U.S. Soldier Kills Afghan Civilians in Kandahar

Source: BBC

A US soldier in Afghanistan has killed at least 16 civilians and wounded five after entering their homes in Kandahar province, senior local officials say.

He left his military base in the early hours of the morning and opened fire in at least two homes; women and children were among the dead.

The soldier has not been named, but is thought to be a staff sergeant.

He is reported to have walked off his base at around 03:00 local time (22:30 GMT Saturday) and headed to nearby villages, moving methodically from house to house.

"Eleven members of my family are dead. They are all dead," Haji Samad, an elder from Najeeban village, told the AFP news agency.

Iranian Media Continues to be Attacked by Foreign Entities

Source: End The Lie
Madison Ruppert

A string of attacks on Iranian media continues with reports of jamming signals coming from an unknown location interrupting broadcasts for two hours.

According to Iran’s Press TV, broadcasts of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting’s (IRIB) international channels on the Hotbird satellite provider were cut out for two hours by these signals.

High-power jamming signals were transmitted on the 12437 MHz frequency from 9:00 to 11:00 GMT on Saturday, March 10, 2012.

During this time, the broadcasts of the IRIB’s international channels were interrupted on multiple occasions.

The channels that were knocked out were Press TV, Iran’s 24-hour English-language international channel along with Al-Alam, Islamic Republic of Iran News Network, Al-Kowsar, along with Sahar 1 and 2 channels.

The jamming of IRIB signals is one of many recent attacks on Iranian media outlets.

According to Press TV, British technicians operating out of Bahrain jammed IRIB channels, again on the Hotbird satellite, blocking provincial channels along with international stations like Press TV and others.

Hackers out of the United States and Israel have also launched cyber attacks on Press TV’s website, according to Press TV.

While this report is not independently confirmed as far as I know, it is far from unreasonable to believe that such activities are taking place given the previous cyber attacks on Iran.

FBI Creating a System for Monitoring All Conversations on Social Networking Sites

Source: Natural News
J. D. Heyes

(NaturalNews) If you're a regular reader of NaturalNews, you're already well aware of the fact that government, the courts and private industry have all essentially disregarded the intent and meaning of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment privacy protections in the age of information technology. It seems that you give up your right to be "secure" in your "persons, houses, papers, and effects" if you dare to use a social media network or virtually any other information exchange system.

The latest onslaught comes from the FBI, which is only the most recent federal agency seeking to monitor all of your conversations on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The bureau has placed a request from tech firms to develop a program that would enable agents to sift through waves of "publicly available" information, ostensibly to look for keywords related to terrorism, criminal activity and other threats to national security.

'Early warning' system?

The goal, according to the bureau's request, is to develop a sort of early warning system that provides real-time intelligence to improve "the FBI's overall situational awareness." The proposed program must "have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats."

The FBI joins DARPA - the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in searching for a program that can "monitor" social media chatter (DARPA, ironically enough, invented the Internet, not Al Gore). The difference there, however, is that the Defense Department and the CIA focus on threats overseas; the FBI, meanwhile, is a domestic law enforcement apparatus, and as such, subject to constitutional restrictions regarding the development of its cases.

Corbett Report Episode 221 - Reclaiming Skepticism

Source: Corbett Report
James Corbett

Skeptics are those who advocate taking a provisional approach to all claims and carefully evaluating all the evidence before coming to a conclusion. In other words, the very process that The Corbett Report is engaged in every week, right? Well, not according to the self-professed “skeptics,” many of whom are content to skewer others for their logical fallacies yet frequently deploy logical fallacies of their own when “debunking” the “conspiracy theorists” that seem to be popping up everywhere. Join us today on The Corbett Report as we note the hypocrisies of the supposed “skeptics” and embrace the term as our own.