The ACLU has filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, asking the agency to force the four biggest mobile carriers (AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile USA) to begin providing Google-released security updates to their Android users. 

Presently, wireless carriers decide arbitrarily whether or not they’ll provide these security updates to their customers. The ACLU warns that “there is no legitimate software upgrade path” for the Android customer, beyond having it provided by the carrier. And without these important security patches, customers risk being hacked — their phones remotely hijacked, their personal and private data stolen, their money fleeced from their online bank accounts.

The ACLU’s Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst, Christopher Soghoian, wrote in the document filed with the FTC:

All four of the major wireless carriers consistently fail to provide consumers with available security updates to repair known security vulnerabilities in the software operating on mobile devices. [...]

The wireless carriers have failed to warn consumers that the smartphones sold to them are defective and that they are running vulnerable operating system and browser software. The delivery of software updates to consumers is not just an industry best practice, but is in fact a basic requirement for companies selling computing devices that they know will be used to store sensitive information, such as intimate photographs, e-mail, instant messages, and online banking credentials.

The ACLU contends that these failures “constitute deceptive and unfair business practices subject to review by the FTC under section 5 of The Federal Trade Commission Act.” If the carriers refuse to provide important security updates, the ACLU states, then the “FTC should at a minimum force them to provide device refunds to consumers and allow consumers to terminate their contracts without penalty so that they can switch to a provider who will.”

JUST HOW BIG IS THIS PROBLEM?

Google’s Android operating system accounts for 75% of the entire smartphone market. This overwhelming dominance has helped make it a prime target for ‘black-hat’ hackers, who exploit vulnerabilities for nefarious, often criminal, purposes. Security company Kaspersky revealed in its Security Bulletin 2012 that “99% of newly discovered mobile malicious programs target the Android platform.” The monthly discovery rate for Android malware has skyrocketed from 8 per month in January 2011 to 800 per month by year end 2011 to a staggering 6,300 per month by year end 2012.

And despite Android’s exploding malware epidemic, only 2% of all Android users have received the latest Google security update from their carriers. Most of them never will.

Ars Technica’s Casey Johnston investigated the roll-out of security updates by manufacturers and wireless carriers. Her article charts the time in months between Google’s update release against the date it was applied to each smartphone. Some phones, she discovered, “never received updates during their lifetime.” She added that “all [the] phones we looked at had Android updates available to them within a reasonable time frame relative to the handset’s release, but the carrier or manufacturer never got around to pushing one out.”

She also found that all the carriers continue to sell phones which they have already ‘orphaned’ — meaning the carrier has no intentions of ever providing a security update to the phone, even if the update is vital for patching a severe vulnerability. The ACLU contends that the carriers have a duty to inform the customer of the severe security risks inherent in these ‘orphaned’ phones, before they purchase them.

For those in the market for a new Android smartphone, but who cannot wait for the ACLU’s efforts to pan out, there is only one Android smartphone guaranteed to receive timely security updates: Nexus. This is Google’s own Android smartphone. Google partners with others (Samsung, HTC, LG, etc) to design and manufacture the Nexus line, but allows all Nexus owners to bypass their carriers, and receive ALL their Android updates directly from Google.

This English trio — formed in Wakefield, West Yorkshire in 2002 — consists of three brothers, two of which are twins. To date, the group has released five albums, most of which enjoyed critical acclaim. As if being completely ignorant of their existence wasn’t bad enough, I then went on to discover that one of my favorite guitarists, Johnny Marr of The Smiths, had become a member of the group between 2008 and 2011.

For those who too may have drifted out of the ‘in’ and into the ‘out’ with regards to the new music scene, you will be in for a pleasant surprise here. ‘Men’s Needs’ is The Cribs’ biggest hit to date. It is hands down excellent.

The video was directed by Diane Martel and shot in Hollywood. It is brilliant in its simplicity — much like the promotional music videos that came out of the UK in the late 70s and early 80s. It simply consists of the band performing in front of a yellow backdrop, but with a naked young woman playing the mischievous saboteur and doing a pret-ty good job of poaching their spotlight.

ENJOY!

Click here to view the embedded video.

In spite of the agency having acknowledged repeatedly in their internal documents that the movement opposes violence, and thus poses no threat, it still used counterterrorism resources and counterterrorism authorities to monitor them.

This may indicate that the movement’s political views in themselves are somehow being construed by officials as a ‘threat’.

The FBI stonewalled The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s FOIA request for over a year, and chose to release the highly redacted documents on the Friday going into the weekend preceding Christmas — a common tactic used by Federal agencies when releasing potentially embarrassing information, to ensure minimal press coverage and minimal public attention.

Today, Amy Goodman invited Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, to appear on DemocracyNow to discuss the group’s FOIA request and findings.

Verheyden-Hilliard tells about the FBI’s “intense coordination both with private businesses, with Wall Street, with the banks, and with state police departments and local police departments around the country.” The documents show the FBI going as far as using private groups as “proxy forces” to conduct undercover infiltration against the peaceful protesters to then report their findings back to the agency.

WATCH:

 Full Transcript

Being one of my all-time favorite songs, I set out to investigate. In order to avoid misinterpreting their quotes, and thus mistakenly discrediting anyone for their contributions to the song, I decided to just use their own words in recalling that 24-hour recording session:

David Bowie tells BBC Radio 1 how they came to meet up in Switzerland on that fateful day in 1981:

That was through Dave Richards, the engineer at the studio. I was in town, in Montreux, doing some other work there, and because I believe that Queen have something to do with the studio on a business level, I think it’s their studio or something like that and they were recording there, and David knew that I was in town and phoned me up and asked me to come down, if I’d like to come down to see what was happening, so I went down, and these things happen you know. Suddenly you’re writing something together, and it was totally spontaneous, it certainly wasn’t planned. It was, er, peculiar [laughs]

Queen’s Roger Taylor describes the evening:

Well, I think the process was we were all drunk and in the studio and we were, just for fun, we were playing all sorts of old songs, and then a couple Cream songs, and whatever came into our heads.

And ah … I think David [Bowie] said, “Look, hang on a minute, why don’t we write our own? We don’t have to play other peoples stuff.” And I think he started on the piano.

And then they made a pact that each one … We got this backing track down, and we got the riff, and we got the bass thing together. So we had this pretty good backing track. And Freddy and David would go in and have a go, and just sing what came into their heads. But one wasn’t allowed to listen to the other. It was quite amusing. And this sort of went through the night, and then we had this sort of strange track at the end of it. 

Queen’s Brian May reflects on the recording in a Guitar World Magazine interview:

“David was living in Switzerland, where we were recording in a studio we owned at the time [Mountain Studios] in Montreux. He basically just popped in to see us. Freddie had met him before. We all had a little chart and then went straight in the studio and started playing around. We played a few old songs and then something new started to happen and we said, “Okay, let’s try and record this.” It was a truly spontaneous thing. We felt our way through a backing track all together as an ensemble. And then David brought up an unusual idea for creating the vocal. He was kind of famous for writing lyrics by collecting different bits of paper with quotes on them. And we did a corresponding thing as regards writing the top line for the song. When the backing track was done, David said, “Okay, let’s each of us go in the vocal booth and sing how we think the melody should go – just off the tops of our heads – and we’ll compile a vocal out of that.” And that’s what we did. Some of the original bits even made it onto the record. Freddie going “b-b-b-boom-ba,” that scat singing stuff, was part of the initial track he went in and did off the top of his head. Odd isnt it? That’s why the words are so curious, some of them, anyway. There was a point where somebody had to take control, and I think it’s fair to say that David took the reins and decided that he wanted to rationalize the lyrics and then say what he felt they should say.”

David Bowie fields a question about the song from a fan on his website in 2004:

The song was written from the ground up on the night I visited their studio. I believe the riff had already been written by Freddie and the others so then we jointly put together the different chord sections to make it a cohesive piece of music. Then Freddie and I came up with our individual top line melodies. So when you hear Freddie sing, that’s what he wrote and when you hear me sing, that was mine. Then we worked on the lyrics together. I still cannot believe that we had the whole thing written and recorded in one evening flat. Quite a feat for what is actually a fairly complicated song.

When Bowie says, “the riff had already been written by Freddie and the others,” I’m assuming he is crediting Freddie and the band with that famed bass line.

But Queen’s bass player, John Deacon, was quoted on two separate occasions after the song’s release crediting Bowie for the bass line:

“Freddie and David had been friends for a long time, and he just came in to the studio we were in and we did a jam session. The song itself is mainly David’s and Freddie’s idea, but we were all included in the credits. It was an interesting experience, because David wrote the bass-line, he’s responsible for it. He’s a talented man, and that song is one of those that I really like.” ~1982

“On the album, the track was credited to Bowie and Queen, but in fact it was essentially Freddie, although all contributed. The bass line came from David, it took me a certain time to learn it. But there was also a strong influence from Brian for the middle part. It was an interesting experience which we might do repeat if we have a chance with David and other people.” ~1984

Bowie’s and Deacon’s conflicting memories — crediting the other rather than themselves — probably gives some degree of insight into just how collaborative this effort really was.

One of the most brilliant aspects of ‘Under Pressure’ — which incidentally became an instant #1 hit — was the sheer diversity in the top line vocal melodies. Because Bowie and Mercury agreed not to listen to each other sing their respective visions of the verses and chorus, each of these gifted melody-men enjoyed full freedom to pursue his own unique ideas, unencumbered by the direction the other was taking. And when they finally brought together Bowie’s and Mercury’s visions the song achieved a rare degree of melodic complexity. Each one’s unique vision was not only as strong as the other’s, they were ingeniously complimentary.

Due to their respective touring schedules, neither Bowie nor Queen were available to appear in the song’s video. Instead the video was a composite of stock footage of packs of people hurrying to and from their jobs (interlaced with silent film clips depicting zombies and mental madness). It then cuts to footage of building demolitions, explosions, then to Wall Street, unemployment, food lines, riots … And just when things seem extremely bleak, it cuts to youthful festival and concert goers — to smiles and kisses and hope. The video has been said to celebrate “the pressure-cooker mentality of a culture willing to wage war against political machines.”

Roger Taylor insists it is about love: “Everybody laughed when they asked what ‘Under Pressure’ was all about. It’s quite simply about love, which is the most un-cool, un-hip thing.”

I have always interpreted the song as a call to recalibrate our society’s moral compass — a plea for compassion.

ENJOY!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pressure pushing down on me
Pressing down on you no man ask for
Under pressure
That burns a building down
Splits a family in two
Puts people on streets

Bah bah bah bah bah bah
Bah bah bah bah bah bah

That’s OK!
It’s the terror of knowing
What this world is about
Watching some good friends
Screaming let me out!
Pray tomorrow takes me higher
Pressure on people
People on streets

Do do do bah bah bah bah
OK
Chipping around
Kick my brains round the floor
These are the days
It never rains but it pours
People on streets
People on streets

It’s the terror of knowing
What this world is about
Watching some good friends
Screaming let me out!
Pray tomorrow takes me higher higher higher
Pressure on people
People on streets
Turned away from it all
Like a blind man
Sat on a fence but it don’t work
Keep coming up with love
But it’s so slashed and torn
Why why why?
Love love love love

Insanity laughs under pressure we’re cracking
Can’t we give ourselves one more chance?
Why can’t we give love that one more chance?
Why can’t we give love give love give love?
Give love give love give love give love give love?
Because love’s such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care
For people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way
Of caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves under pressure
Under pressure … pressure

This summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour. My Apple, Twitter, and Gmail passwords were all robust—seven, 10, and 19 characters, respectively, all alphanumeric, some with symbols thrown in as well—but the three accounts were linked, so once the hackers had conned their way into one, they had them all. They really just wanted my Twitter handle: @mat. As a three-letter username, it’s considered prestigious. And to delay me from getting it back, they used my Apple account to wipe every one of my devices, my iPhone and iPad and MacBook, deleting all my messages and documents and every picture I’d ever taken of my 18-month-old daughter.

Security companies have long striven to devise that killer app to provide an iron-clad fortress around our passwords. Password Managers are the much-hyped internet security apps of the moment, and security giants like Symantic (Norton) and Kaspersky have jumped the bandwagon with their own variations on this model.

Here is how Neil Rubenking of PC Mag describes the core functionality of these apps:

When you log in to a secure site, your password manager captures the username and password; when you revisit that site, it offers to fill in the saved credentials. That, at its most basic, is the function of a password manager.

Many of these applications require that you manually enter each of your user names and unique passwords into their application. Because you will never have to remember them again, you can make each one of them as complex as possible, such as 20+ digit hodgepodge strings of letter/number/symbol combinations. Some of these security companies will even encrypt them locally on your PC, so that when they are stored up on the cloud not even an odd rogue employee in their ranks will be able to figure them out.

And most significantly, since they will be automatically filled in by the Password Manager, a malicious keyboard logger will be unable to hijack all these unique passwords from you.

Iron clad security!

So how will you be accessing this Password Manager so that it can begin to log you into ALL your online accounts with these highly uncrackable passwords?

Oh right, you’ll need to come up with a single password that you can remember to log into your Password Manager. Hopefully this SINGLE memorable password won’t get picked up by a malicious keyboard logger, or somehow cracked by a malicious hacker. Because if that were to happen, he would gain instant access to EVERY SINGLE ACCOUNT YOU HAVE. 

The entire logic behind this idea is fatally flawed. It is akin to using the same password for all of your many accounts — something every security professional warns you against doing.

Sam Seder

As a follow up to that debate, Seder posed the following question to Stoller, Chris Hedges, and everyone else who believes that the best way forward for progressives is to support third party candidates:

How does voting for Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson speed up the building of a movement that is a counterweight to corporate power?

Seder contends that progressives became more conscious of the struggle between the people and corporate powers under a Democratic President (Obama) than they had under a Republican one (Bush). That these 99% vs 1% lines were essentially drawn BECAUSE we had a Democratic President, and that another term for Obama would only help to grow this populist movement. He adds that if Romney were to become President the “economic injustice” movement would just transform into an “anti-Republican” one.

I disagree with Seder’s arguments. I would contend that the party of the sitting President was irrelevant to the occupy movement. Rather, the timing of the movement was driven entirely by the economic pain, as it spread across the entire industrialized world.

It makes perfect sense that the movement formulated during Obama’s term, because the financial meltdown occurred in the final months of the Bush Administration. During those last few months, Hank Paulson terrified Congress into signing TARP, and the monthly unemployment numbers skyrocketed in a way not seen since the Great Depression. And as State tax revenues began to dry up shortly thereafter, severe austerity measures were imposed at the local level — resulting in laid off school teachers and other government workers. I.e. It took a couple years for the economic pain to spread and manifest into that progressive populist movement.

Though this movement against economic injustice would have happened regardless of which party occupied the White House, if there had been a Republican President, the crowd numbers would likely have been even twice as large. Why? Because THERE ARE many Democratic partisans whose entire socioeconomic POV fits nicely and neatly within the Democratic-Republican paradigm. These types would protest for any liberal cause — just as long as a Republican President or Governor could be linked to the blame. Many of these Democrats belittled occupy’s efforts BECAUSE they couldn’t co-opt the movement for Obama. This would have been a mute point if a Republican were in power.

For proof, one must look no further than the hundred thousand protesters who stormed the Wisconsin State Capitol under Republican Governor Scott Walker in protest of that Republican-dominated state legislature’s assault on collective bargaining.

As far as Seder’s central question: “How does voting 3rd party speed up the building of a movement that is counterweight to corporate power?” — what he refuses to acknowledge is that the populist ‘movement’ he speaks of has NO political representation in Washington. NONE. ZERO.

In fact, many in support of the movement he cites actually helped to usher Obama into the White House in 2008, and are now fully cognizant of the fact that Obama has been 100% complicit in the destructive policies that have rewarded moneyed interests off the backs of the American people.

The important question — the one that Seder does not want to ask — is how does a movement go about making a non-representative government more representative? Especially, when the party traditionally allied to that movement’s ideology — the Democrats — now operate with the understanding that there are no voter repercussions for anything they do — an understanding spawned by Seder’s very own “lessor of two evils” mindset.

Take Obama’s entire first term. He broke promise after promise — selling out to corporate interests, degrading our civil liberties, declaring war on whistleblowers, etc — BECAUSE of the calculations he made with regards to progressives having nowhere else to go. So, if voters reward Obama for having made this insidious calculation against them, how would that actually work to change his or future Democratic Presidents’ behavior?

It wouldn’t.

It would achieve the very opposite by reinforcing the idea that Obama’s strategy in deceit is not only a winning one, but actually minimizes political risks. Why? Because unlike voters, the entrenched corporations — with hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal — do have somewhere else to go. Republican, Democrat, … makes no difference to them.

The message an Obama victory would send to all future Democratic Presidential Candidates is: run and win on a popular progressive platform, and then, like Obama, pull a ‘bait and switch’ — with the goal of building up your campaign war chest in corporate money, and with impunity since progressives have nowhere else to go.

So my question to Seder would be: How successful can any peaceful populist movement be if it remains completely loyal to a political party that feels free to cavalierly ignore their wishes, while reaping tens of millions of dollars in political donations for having done so? 

Politicians must be conditioned to understand that there is a political price to be paid for selling out the voters’ best interests. This underlying principle is the essential cornerstone for all representative democracies. If the voters are too timid to punish the politicians for betraying their interests — as Sam Seder argues they should be — then politicians will naturally continue to betray their interests.

Seder’s strategy of voting Democratic, no matter what, trades away all long-term progressive opportunities for little more than a slight reduction in speed of this nation’s rightward acceleration. Like a CEO forever focused on meeting next quarter’s earnings estimates, while paying no attention to the overall degrading health of the organization he runs.

Voting third party is a strategy that works to re-align the interests of elected officials with the interests of the people, by making them understand that progressives do in fact have somewhere else to go. Governments which believe themselves to be unaccountable to the people they govern are not democracies. And that is the crisis we face.

Two weeks later and over 200 miles away from where Awlaki was killed, his 16 year old son, Abdulrahman — an American citizen and native of Denver, CO — was targeted and murdered by an American drone.

The Obama Administration, to date, has refused to explain why they killed this young American boy. They have never claimed that he was in anyway affiliated with al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. In fact the boy had not even seen his father in over two years, since his father went into hiding. 

A couple of reporters from WeAreChange.org approached Former White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, and asked him several questions regarding the President’s flip-flop on NDAA, his ‘Kill List’, and how he justified extra-judicially killing a 16 year old American citizen. Here is the portion of the transcript that pertains to al-Awlaki’s son’s assassination, by journalist Sierra Adamson:

Adamson: Do you think the killing of al-Awlaki’s 16 year old son, an American citizen, was justifiable? 

Gibbs: I…I…I…I … I’m not going to get into al-Awlaki’s son. I know that Anwar al-Awlaki renounced his citizenship—

Adamson: His son was still an American citizen.

Gibbs: —did great harm to people in this country, and was a regional al-Qaeda commander, hoping to inflict harm and destruction on people that share his religion and others in this country.

Adamson: That’s an American citizen that’s been targeted without due process of law, without trial, and he’s under age. He’s a minor. 

Gibbs: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they’re truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.

Wow! So, even though you cannot choose your parents, Gibbs warns that you may be assassinated for being the offspring of the ‘wrong ones’.

WATCH:

Click here to view the embedded video.

WATCH:

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou plead guilty this morning to revealing the identity of a CIA officer in the agency’s detention and interrogation program. He is expected to spend 2 1/2 years in prison.

The reason he chose to negotiate a plea deal rather than go to trial was summarized succinctly by Marcy Wheeler (investigative blogger, Emptywheel):

… the rush to make a plea deal came after [U.S. District Court Judge] Brinkema ruled, on October 16, that the government didn’t need to prove Kiriakou intended to damage the country by leaking the names of a bunch of torturers. That ruling effectively made it difficult for Kiriakou to prove he was whistleblowing, by helping lawyers defending those who have been tortured figure out who the torturers were.

So ironically, John Kiriakou — who took enormous risks as a whistleblower to expose criminality — will do jail time as if he were the criminal, while the torturers themselves remain free.

Today on HuffPost Live, Alyona Minkovski hosted an all-star panel to discuss the John Kiriakou whistleblower case, including:

• Marcy Wheeler (Grand Rapids, MI) Investigative Blogger, Emptywheel @emptywheel
• Kelley Vlahos (Washington, DC) Columnist, Antiwar.com @KelleyBVlahos
• Col. Morris Davis (DC, WA) Former Chief Prosecutor for the Military Commissions at Guantanamo @ColMorrisDavis
• Jesselyn Radack (Washington, DC) National Security & Human Rights Director at Government Accountability Project @JesselynRadack
• Josh Gerstein (Arlington) Reporter, POLITICO @joshgerstein

WATCH:

Schwartz describes the significance of fusion centers and the role they play:

“In the wake of the 9-11 terror attacks, the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars to have the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security fund state and local fusion centers. These are state organizations that fuse under one roof, as much information as possible about people who are suspected of criminal or terror activity and then they funnel this information towards the Department of Homeland Security.”

Fusion centers maintain a large number of databases on each person, including gov’t criminal databases, gov’t noncriminal ones, and private ones. 

A recently published U.S. Senate investigative report concluded that the information coming from the fusion centers was unrelated to terrorism, and instead threatened citizens’ Privacy Act protections and civil liberties:

The investigation found that DHS intelligence officers assigned to state and local fusion centers produced intelligence of “uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

WATCH: 

Click here to view the embedded video.