Breaking: Explosion Reported at Boston Marathon's Finish Line

[Magda Hassan]

Fox News reports a 7 mile no fly zone imposed for under 3000 feet over Boston area currently under lockdown.

Whoever these 'suspects' are or are not, most are not paying enough attention to the freedoms being taken away from ordinary citizens. OK, five have been killed - lets make it six and they [THEY] say one aged 19 is out there alone. Does he have stinger missiles to shoot down planes? Bioweapons to lockdown a whole city? Nukes? I used to live in NYC and there were many days a killer was on the loose; but city life went on as usual - except in the very area the police were operating. This is both bizarre and once it is 'acquiesced to' by the public, it will become the norm every time.....you heard it here. The 'rachet' that is ratcheting away our freedoms moves in only one direction. Unless we fight back and resist. This is about more than two brothers - be they bombers or patsies.

Get this...rather than search their home in Cambridge and learn who they are, what might be in their home and computer, etc. They are planning shortly on blowing up their home [the excuse is it is probably booby-trapped] - and destroying all evidence. I say they are patsies and the controlled explosion of their home [and their being shot - one down, one to go] is a Ruby rubout of LHO in modern form.

Looming Cyber-Security Bill Could Have Spoiled Reddit's Boston Investigation

Flickr/SklathillWhen the FBI came out Thursday with a [B]few blurry images and asked for "help" identifying the subjects, they were asking Reddit.

Put more simply, they were asking the Internet to help them find the suspects.
And the Internet answered: within a few hours of the FBI's release of these images, the Reddit hive-mind produced a much clearer image of the suspected bomber.
Then, as if that weren't enough, Reddit placed the suspected bomber in the same frame as 8 year-old victim Martin Richard, with a bag that looked an awful lot like the one the FBI was trying to identify.
So basically, in this grisly game of Clue, Reddit did the FBI's job for them: all in one spot, killer, murder weapon, victim, and the scene of the crime.
Now here's the kicker the FBI is among the top groups lobbying the government and private web companies for more surveillance over the internet, ie. CISPA, a bill which just passed the House, may pass the Senate, and may cross Obama's desk.
As we've covered before, CISPA "authorizes federal agencies to conduct warrantless searches of information they obtain from e-mail and Internet providers," as explained by Declan McCullough of CNET.
Part of the reason for CISPA is that massive companies are hemoraging proprietary information, through the likes of hackers conducting cyber espionage. Some of these hackers are state-sanctioned, others are downright criminal.
It goes without mentioning that Redditors, and the Internet cesspool dwellers on 4Chan,hackers of all colour, despise this piece of legislation.
Why? Because CISPA would unmask the Internet. Without anonymity, without hacker handles, without online alter egos, there is no image of Martin Richard next to the bomb and the bomber.
Granted, Reddit spurred a few false leads rumours about missing Brown student Sunil Tripathiand various people carrying bags at the Marathon, but the consensus seems to be that Reddit helped more than it hurt.
Because they can operate freely, without recourse, Anonymous and Reddit and 4Chan can crowdsource information gathering. Stripping them of their online identities though essentially killing the Internet hive mind would remove the barrier under which these folks operate.
They've proven that they can operate for ill, but their operations for good match the ill by tenfold. Even amongst the trolls, Internet dwellers as a single body, the hive-mind, has an acute sense of justice and injustice.
Gabriella Coleman said "geeks are the new guardians of our civil liberties."
Extinguishing that moral compass simply because Bank of America or Lockheed Martin arelosing proprietary information to the Chinese is a dangerous course of action.
[/B]

http://au.businessinsider.com/boston-bom...spa-2013-4

Lawmakers Cite Boston Bombing, WikiLeaks "Hacking" as Reasons to Pass CISPA

By Ryan Gallagher
|
Posted Friday, April 19, 2013, at 4:23 PM

Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., is in favor of CISPA
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

North Korean hackers and the Boston bombings might not appear to have much in common. But not according to some American lawmakers, who are using both to justify passing a controversial cybersecurity bill that civil liberties advocatesclaim "undermines the privacy of millions of Internet users."

Yesterday, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, was approved by the House of Representatives by a vote of 288 to 127. The law was first introduced in 2011 andapproved last year by the House, though it died in the Senate after an outpouring of opposition from privacy and civil liberties groups. But it has been resurrected and is heading to the Senate for the second time. Predictably, the storm of criticism has also reappeared. Rights groups have consistently raised concerns over how CISPA would allow corporations to pass unanonymized user data to federal government agencies for vaguely defined "cybersecurity" purposesand be covered by full legal indemnity when doing so.

The ACLU has described CISPA as an "extreme proposal" that "forges new ground." The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it "would provide a gaping exception to bedrock privacy law." And even the White House has criticized the bill, earlier this weekthreatening to veto it unless it is amended to include better privacy and civil liberties safeguards.

But yesterday, when the House was debating the contentious bill, CISPA advocates didn't seem to be paying attention to any of those issues. Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, cited the Boston bombings while arguing for CISPA to be adopted. "In the case of Boston, they were real bombs," McCaul said, adding that we also need to arm ourselves against "digital bombs. These bombs are on their way." Similarly apocalyptic statements were made by Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., who made no mention of Boston, though argued that CISPA was needed to stop hackers in countries like Iran and North Korea from crippling American infrastructure and causing the destruction of American jobs. Rep. Dan Maffei, D-N.Y., even used the debate to take aim at WikiLeaks, bizarrely claiming CISPA was needed to stop the whistleblowing website from pursuing efforts to "hack into our nation's power grid."


In the aftermath of tragic events or amid heightened global tensions, it's hardly unusual for lawmakers to make emotive appeals in pursuit of new national security powers. Public opinion in the aftermath of a distressing terror attack in particular can sway citizens in favor of handing the authorities more intrusive surveillance powers, as occurred in most Western democracies in the aftermath of 9/11 (the Patriot Act being just one example). In the case of CISPA, however, it is tenuous in the extreme to draw sweeping links between cyberattacks and pressure-cooker bombs tearing through a Boston street, or cyberattacks and WikiLeaks, or cyberattacks and whatever else is agitating U.S. lawmakers on a given day. Exploiting every perceived threat to counter a push for greater CISPA privacy protections is brazenly cynicaland, I'd argue, ultimately doomed to fail.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/...assed.html

Some interesting matters in the comments to this link:http://www.legitgov.org/US-House-sociopa...sses-CISPA