illuminating

From: Las parabras del silencio

“[The Voynich] manuscript, now housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, has elicited enormous interest, resulting in numerous books and Internet sites with no conclusive resolution on the manuscript's origin. Even the US National Security Agency has taken an interest in its cryptic contents, and doctoral theses have been written on attempts to decipher the language of the Voynich Manuscript.

     HerbalGram's feature article by Arthur O. Tucker, PhD, and Rexford H. Talbert, titled ‘A Preliminary Analysis of the Botany, Zoology, and Mineralogy of the Voynich Manuscript,’ is based on a unique, investigative approach to understanding the strange manuscript. Past researchers have attempted to prove that the manuscript was a product of Europe, mainly because it was discovered in Italy, but also because they believed a European language to be hidden in the writing system of the text. Other theorists proposed Asian origins based on the premise that cloaked Chinese characters existed within syllabary of the Voynich Manuscript. As with many of humankind's most enduring mysteries, aliens have been implicated as well.
     Dr. Tucker — botanist, emeritus professor, and co-director of the Claude E. Phillips Herbariumat Delaware State University — and Mr. Talbert, a retired information technologist formerly employed by the US Department of Defense and NASA, decided to look first at the botanical illustrations in the Voynich Manuscript and compare them to the world's geographic plant distribution at the time of the manuscript's first recorded appearance (ca. 1576-1612).
     The similarities between a plant illustrated in the Voynich Manuscript and the soap plant depicted in the 1552 Codex Cruz-Badianus of Mexico — considered the first medical text written in the New World — propelled the authors down a path leading to the identification of 37 plants, 6 animals, and 1 mineral in the manuscript from the Americas — specifically, from post-Conquest Nueva España (New Spain) and the surrounding regions.”
— Digital Journal
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An Open Book

From: doublebinding

“A Toronto woman denied a flight to New York as part of a cruise trip wants to know who told U.S. border agents about her history of mental illness.

     Ellen Richardson says she was turned away by a U.S. customs agent at Pearson International Airport on Monday because she had been hospitalized for clinical depression in June 2012.
     She missed her flight to New York City and a Caribbean cruise, for which she had paid $6,000, as a result.”
— CBC via Huffington Post
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If border officials are making decisions based on medical records, what’s to stop them from checking on reading habits as well?

“For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.
     The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.”
— Alexandra Alter, The Wall Street Journal
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“As recent weeks [July/August, 2013] of revelations [about the flagrant invasiveness of the NSA] have shown, there's a pretty wide gap between our expectations of privacy, and the privacies that an increasingly digitized world actually affords us. Whatever your feelings about your own privacy, the complexity and opacity of technology means it's often hard to know exactly what information you might be sharing at any given time. And while browsing in a local library, buying a book – with cash – on the high street, and reading at home or on the bus are pretty anonymous activities, as soon as ebooks are involved they're not.”
— James Bridle, The Guardian
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God Complex

"Unlike the British government, which, to its great credit, allowed public debate on the idea of a central data bank, the NSA obtained the full cooperation of much of the American telecom industry in utmost secrecy after September 11. For example, the agency built secret rooms in AT&T’s major switching facilities where duplicate copies of all data are diverted, screened for key names and words by computers, and then transmitted on to the agency for analysis. Thus, these new centers in Utah, Texas, and possibly elsewhere will likely become the centralized repositories for the data intercepted by the NSA in America’s version of the 'big brother database' rejected by the British.

     Matthew M. Aid has been after the NSA’s secrets for a very long time. As a sergeant and Russian linguist in the NSA’s Air Force branch, he was arrested and convicted in a court-martial, thrown into prison, and slapped with a bad conduct discharge for impersonating an officer and making off with a stash of NSA documents stamped Top Secret Codeword. He now prefers to obtain the NSA’s secrets legally, through the front door of the National Archives.
     The result is The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency, a footnote-heavy history told largely through declassified but heavily redacted NSA reports that have been slowly trickling out of the agency over the years. They are most informative in the World War II period but quickly taper off in substance during the cold war."
— James Bamford, DMZ Hawaii
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"… cooperation allows law enforcement agencies to circumvent the straightforward restrictions that you believe in, by having the agencies of one country conduct surveillance on the citizens of another country, then share that information with the agencies of the other country.
     Yes, with the very agencies that are required by their country’s law to obtain a warrant prior to such surveillance. To use Canada and the US as an example, the NSA intercepts and collects the communications of Canadians, then shares it with CSIS [Canadian Security Intelligence Service], the RCMP and other Canadian law enforcement agencies. The CSE [Communications Security Establishment] intercepts and collects the communications of Americans, then shares it with the FBI, CIA and other American agencies.
     This form of cooperation is possible because the restrictions that liberal democracies typically place upon their law enforcement agencies in dealing with their own citizens, in the form of judicial supervision and authorization, do not generally apply to the activities of foreign citizens. In Canada, for example, the National Defence Act allows the CSE to intercept communications related to 'foreign intelligence' on the authority of the Minister of National Defence – and therefore without any form of judicial supervision.
     Foreign intelligence is 'information or intelligence about the capabilities, intentions or activities of a foreign individual, state, organization or terrorist group, as they relate to international affairs, defence or security.' To the CSE all American communication is 'foreign' – and therefore fair game. Similarly, for the NSA all Canadian communication is 'foreign' – and therefore fair game as well."
— Avner Levin, PEN Canada
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"We all knew that the saga of Edward Snowden and his NSA leaks would eventually get the tell-all book treatment (several times, probably), but it looks we'll soon get an account from someone who is actually in a position to tell-all: journalist Glenn Greenwald. The publisher Metropolitan Books has announced that Greenwald has a new deal in place to write a book about NSA surveillance, which — thanks in large part to Snowden — he probably knows more about than any private citizen. The book is scheduled to be published in March 2014."
— Dashiell Bennett, The Atlantic WIRE
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See a related post here...

Buy Matthew M. Aid's book, and all of James Bamford's books here...

"... that’s five zettabytes that they can put into Bluffdale."

From: Modcult

"Well, what they’re putting together there in Bluffdale is a million-square-foot storage facility, of which only 100,000 is really going to have equipment to store data. But the rest of it, the peripherals, then are power generation, cooling and so on. So, but in there, there’s 100,000 square feet of storage capacity. And at current capabilities that are advertised on the web with Cleversafe.com, they can put 10 exabytes in about 200 feet—square feet of storage space in 21 racks. What that means is, when you divide that out, is you—that even at current capacity to store information, that’s five zettabytes that they can put into Bluffdale. And if you—and my estimate of the data they would be collecting, which would include the targeted audio and perhaps all of the text in the world, that would be on the order of 20 terabytes a minute—or, yeah, 20 terabytes a minute. So if you figure out from that how much they could collect, it would be like 500 years of the world’s communications. But I only estimated a hundred, because really they want space for parallel processors to go at cryptanalysis and breaking codes.

     …Well, they came in, and there were like 12 FBI agents with their guns drawn, and came in. My son opened the door, let them in, and they pushed him out of the way at gunpoint. And they came upstairs to where my wife was getting dressed, and I was in the shower, and they were pointing guns at her, and then they—one of the agents came into the shower and pointed a gun directly at me, at my head, and of course pulled me out of the shower. So I had a towel, at least, to wrap around, but—so that’s what they did."
— William Binney, former senior NSA crypto-mathematician
(in an interview with Amy Goodman) Democracy Now!
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