PNN - Presents Patriots On Patrol

PNN -  7/14/13

PNN presents Patriot on Patrol - featuring activists and the challenges they've undertaken. Patriotism, isn't flag waving, flag wavings easy. Patriotism, isn't  shouting slogans, shouting slogans is easy. Activists undertake reducing mountains to little grindy pebbles.

 News, Rick …………………..7:02 PM
 News, Renee …………...….…7:13 PM
 Patrick Murphy…...……..……7:24 PM
 Jonel Jones …………...……... 7:55 PM
 Legal Shield-------.........---------8:11 PM
 Paige Hooper-Reichbart............8:13 PM
 P.E. Nolan …………………….8:29 PM
menopausal stoners, world wide hippy,
 Frank Day  ….……………….8:45 PM

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News Stories

1. Insider Threat Program
In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

Obama mandated the program in an October 2011 executive order after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from a classified computer network and gave them to WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy group. The order covers virtually every federal department and agency, including the Peace Corps, the Department of Education and others not directly involved in national security.

Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”

Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.
Over the years, numerous studies of public and private workers who’ve been caught spying, leaking classified information, stealing corporate secrets or engaging in sabotage have identified psychological profiles that could offer clues to possible threats. Administration officials want government workers trained to look for such indicators and report them so the next violation can be stopped before it happens.

Read more here:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/09/196211/linchpin-for-obamas-plan-to-predict.html#storylink=cpy

2. Computers banned in Florida
The owner, Consuelo Zapata, is now suing the state after her legal team found that the ban was so hastily worded that it can be applied to any computer or device connected to the Internet, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Miami Herald.
    A.    ban defines illegal slot machines as any "system or network of devices" that may be used in a game of chance.
And that broad wording can be applied to any number of devices, according to the Miami law firm of Kluger, Kaplan, Silverman, Katzen & Levine, who worked with constitutional law attorney and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz.

3. black dust
Marco Kaltofen, President at Boston Chemical Data Corp. & Doctoral student researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute: [...] We kept hearing reports about something unusual, a black dust that was on the surface of soils or streets that was much more radioactive than any surrounding soils. So it was almost as if some concentrated radioactive contaminant from the accident was pretty much refusing to disburse, collecting in a certain gully or gutter and folks were getting it. So we finally got a very small sample of that [...]

What’s different about this material is unlike a lot of the soil and dust samples we’ve gotten, there’s a real uniformity to this stuff. It’s a single substance. It’s not a mix of mineral particles and pieces of dead bugs and plant matter and dust particles. It’s actually very homogenous and uniform when you look at it under the microscope. And it doesn’t look like the surrounding soils. And it is much more intensely radioactive than any other soil or dust sample we’ve gotten from around Fukushima Daiichi. So this material is different. It’s not a natural soil. There’s something unusual happening with this stuff. [...]

There’s not just the Cesium that’s in here. We also saw a good deal of radium. The sample had fairly high levels of radium 226. Now that’s not a radioisotope that we hear as much about. The radium 226 has almost as much activity as the radioactive Cesium in the sample. Radium 226 is a degradation product of uranium and we can’t really detect the uranium directly. [...]

And this tells me that this particle contains not only fission waste products from the reactor but very likely contains a concentrated unburned nuclear fuel. And that’s unusual. This sample had by far the highest level of uranium daughters that we’ve seen in a dust or soil sample.  We’re actually seeing material that might well have come from inside a failed fuel assembly.

Arnie Gundersen, Fairewinds’ Chief Engineer: Okay. When I hear that, that’s clear evidence that the containment was breached. The interesting thing to me is that when I hear black, I think of like algae or fungi or something like that. But you’re saying this is not an organic substance. Is that right?

Kaltofen: No. It’s not an organic substance. It’s a mixture of very small particles and just the way they aggregate gives it the appearance of being black, but it’s – it probably – I won’t say optical illusion, but it’s an optical effect of the size of the particles and the way they’re joined together. [...]
Gundersen: Are these particles light enough for people to ingest them or breathe them in?
Kaltofen: Well, certainly they could be ingested [...] right now I would say they’re much more an ingestion hazard. And that usually tends to target children and agricultural workers. [...] A child on average consumes between 100 and 200 milligrams of soil a day because of hand-to-mouth activity. So that’s something to really think about.

4. tampons and maxipads banned from Texas Legislature
texas legislator panties in a twist

Democrats in the Texas Senate on Friday questioned whether proposed abortion restrictions are constitutional and whether they would make it more difficult for women in the state to obtain health care.


5.  Chevron Granted Sweeping Subpoena Of Critics’ Internet Data
By: DSWright Friday July 12, 2013 7:35 am fdl

A federal judge has granted Chevron a broad and sweeping subpoena for data related to the $18.2 billion judgment against Chevron in Ecuador. The subpoena is trying to gain information on journalists and activists who may have been critical of Chevron.
After more than eight months of silence, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan recently issued a long-awaited decision on the enforceability of a subpoena served by Chevron on Microsoft in connection with Chevron’s lawsuit claiming that it has been the victim of a conspiracy in the $18.2 billion judgment against it for massive environmental contamination in Ecuador. But Kaplan’s decision begs more questions than it answers.
The sweeping subpoena was one of three issued to Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, demanding IP usage records and identity information for the holders of more than 100 email accounts, including environmental activists, journalists and attorneys. Chevron’s subpoena sought personal information about every account holder and the IP addresses associated with every login to each account over a nine-year period.

Can you say overreach? The Electronic Frontier Foundation represented the accountholders and fought the subpoenas in courts in California and New York on First Amendment grounds – to no avail. The judge was seemingly determined to see it Chevron’s way.
Kaplan’s decision upheld Chevron’s sweeping subpoena with an argument that is as breathtaking as the subpoena itself. According to Judge Kaplan, none of the accountholders could benefit from First Amendment protections since the accountholders had “not shown that they were U.S. citizens.”
Now, let’s break this down. The account-holders in this case were proceeding anonymously, which the First Amendment permits. Because of this, Judge Kaplan was provided with no information about the account holders’ residency or places of birth. It is somewhat amazing then, that Judge Kaplan assumed that the account holders were not U.S. citizens. As far as I know, a judge has never before made this assumption when presented with a First Amendment claim. We have to ask then: on what basis did Judge Kaplan reach out and make this assumption?
Talk about a sweeping precedent. If you can not demonstrate your citizenship, you can not be protected by the Constitution. That would essentially kill anonymous posting on the internet.
This case, along with the NSA’s vacuuming up of everyone’s private information, demonstrates that there needs to be some sort of cultural awakening to both the value of data and the rights people already have (let alone should have) in protecting it.


6. Massive, uncontained leak at Fukushima is pouring over 710 billion becquerels of radioactive materials into atmosphere

more: http://www.naturalnews.com/040058_Fukushima_radioactive_nuclear_leak.html#ixzz2Z3fKRbSU

The tsunami-caused nuclear accident at the Fukushima power station in Japan is the disaster that never ends, as new reports indicate that a wealth of new radioactive materials have been spewed into the atmosphere.
According to Singapore-based news outlet AsiaOne, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the multi-nuclear reactor power station at Fukushima, announced April 6 that some 120 tons of water that had been contaminated with radioactive substances had leaked from an underground storage facility at the No. 1 atomic power plant site.
Running out of storage room?
TEPCO officials announced the leak late in the day April 5, a Friday, "but said measures to address the problem had not been taken for two days because the cause had not been identified," AsiaOne reported. The company "assumed the water was still leaking."
According to company officials TEPCO estimates that the leaked water contains about 710 billion becquerels of radioactive substances, making it the largest leak of radioactive materials ever at the plant. Discovery of the leak led the company to transfer about 13,000 tons of polluted, radioactive water in the questionable storage area to a neighboring underground storage unit.
That storage unit, TEPCO said, is 60 meters long, 53 meters wide and six meters deep. It is pool-like in structure and has a three-layer waterproof sheet with a concrete cover.
According to the company, water that has leaked from damaged nuclear reactors is run through filters and additional devices in order to remove radioactive elements. The water is then stored in facilities for low-level contaminated water.

TEPCO began using the storage facility Feb. 1. As of April 5, 13,000 tons of radioactive water was being stored there - very close to the 14,000-ton limit.

More leaking contamination
AsiaOne reported that water samples taken by TEPCO from soil surrounding the damaged facility a few days later showed 35 becquerels per cubic centimeter of radioactive substances, which is abnormal. "Safe" levels of becquerels is 300 per kilogram of water, according to New Scientist.
However, TEPCO officials did not publicly announce their findings right away after not finding any other unusual changes in water quality data, such as chloride concentration.
On April 5, the report said, two days after the problem was first noticed, water with 6,000 becquerels per cubic centimeter of radioactive substances was located between the first and second layers of the waterproof sheet, which alerted TEPCO engineers and plant officials that a leak had occurred.
Per AsiaOne:
As the sheet's layers were joined when the facility was constructed, TEPCO assumed that the sheet may have been damaged, or that a mistake had been made during construction. An average of about 400 tons a day of groundwater seeped into buildings housing nuclear reactors and turbines, increasing the quantity of polluted water.
The latest problem will create a storage shortage; TEPCO officials said storage of polluted water at the facility will be reduced from 53,000 tons to 40,000 - a significant reduction. That will make it necessary for the power company to go over procedures for handling polluted water, which will include increasing the number of storage units.
The disaster that keeps on giving
TEPCO said earlier this month it expected the water transfer would take about five days to complete.
"As the height of the water storage facility is relatively low, we think it's unlikely that the polluted water mixed into underground water and reached the sea 800 meters away," said Masayuki Ono, the acting chief of TEPCO's nuclear facilities department, at a press conference April 6.
The plant was damaged by a huge earthquake-caused tsunami March 11, 2011. At the time of the incident, three of the plant's atomic reactors were shut down: No. 4 had been de-fueled and Nos. 5 and 6 were in cold shut-down for maintenance.
The remaining three automatically shut down at the time of the accident and emergency generators came on to keep coolant systems operating.

Sources for this article include:
http://news.asiaone.com
http://www.newscientist.com
http://www.naturalnews.com/Fukushima.html

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/040058_Fukushima_radioactive_nuclear_leak.html#ixzz2Z3f9wDLN

7. Fukushima Situation Normal, in The SNAFU Sense of "Normal"
Bad as the situation is at Fukushima, it's gotten worse.

Perhaps you've heard that radiation levels of the water leaving the Fukushima, Japan, nuclear power plane and flowing into the Pacific Ocean have risen by roughly 9,000 per cent. Turns out, that's probably putting a good face on it.
By official measurement, the water coming out of Fukushima is currently 90,000 times more radioactive than officially "safe" drinking water. 
These are the highest radiation levels measured at Fukusmima since March 2011, when an earthquake-triggered tsunami destroyed the plant's four nuclear reactors, three of which melted down.
As with all nuclear reporting, precise and reliable details are hard to come by, but the current picture as of July 10 seems to be something like this:

"   On July 5, radiation levels at Fukushima were what passes for "normal," which means elevated and dangerous, but stable, according to measurements by the owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

"   On July 8, radiation levels had jumped about 90 times higher, as typically reported.  TEPCO had no explanation for the increase.

"   On July 9, radiation levels were up again from the previous day, but at a slower rate, about 22 per cent.  TEPCO still had no explanation.

"   On July 10, Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) issued a statement saying that the NRA strongly suspects the radioactive water is coming from Fukushima's Reactor #1 and is going into the Pacific.

We Must Do Something About This Thing With No Impact
"We must find the cause of the contamination . . . and put the highest priority on implementing countermeasures," NRA Chairman Shunichi Tanaka told an NRA meeting, according to Japan Times.
    
As for TEPCO, the paper reported, "The utility has claimed it has detected "no significant impact' on the environment."

"in the SNAFU sense of "Normal'"

Neither the NRA nor TEPCO has determined why the level of radioactivity has been increasing. Both characterize the increase as a "spike," but so far this is a "spike" that has not yet started to come down.  Here's another perspective on the same situation:

"   10 becquerels per liter -- The officially "safe" level for radioactivity in drinking water, as set by the NRA.

A becquerel is a standard scientific measure of radioactivity, similar in some ways to a rad or a rem or a roentgen or a sievert or a curie, but not equivalent to any of them.  But you don't have to understand the nuances of nuclear physics to get a reasonable idea of what's going on in Fukushima.  Just keep the measure of that safe drinking water in mind, that liter of water, less than a quart, with 10 becquerels of radioactivity.

"  60 becquerels per liter -- For nuclear power plants, the safety limit for drinking water is 60 becquerels, as set by the NRA, with less concern for nuclear plant workers than ordinary civilians.

"   60-90 becquerels per liter -- For waste water at nuclear power plants, the NRA sets a maximum standard of 90 becquerels per liter for Cesium-137 and 60 becquerels per liter of Cesium-134.

At some of Fukushima's monitoring wells, radiation levels were in fractions of a becquerel on July 8 and 9. At the well (or wells) that are proving problematical, TEPCO has provided no baseline readings.

"  9,000 becquerels per liter -- On July 8, according to TEPCO, the company measured radioactive Cesium-134 at 9,000 becquerels per liter.  Since TEPCO characterized this as 90 times higher than on July 5, the implication is that the earlier reading (about 100) was less than twice as toxic as the allowable limit and only 10 times more toxic than drinking water for civilians.

"   11,000 becquerels per liter -- TEPCO's measurement of Cesium-134 on July 9.   

"    18,000 becquerels per liter -- TEPCO measurement of  Cesium-137 on July 8.

"    22,000 becquerels per liter -- TEPCO's measurement of Cesium-137 on July 9.

"    900,000 becquerels per liter -- TEPCO's measurement of the total radioactivity in the water leaking from Reactor #1.  This radiation load includes both Cesium isotopes, as well as Tritium, Strontium and other beta emitters.  There are more that 60 radioactive substances that have been identified at the Fukushima site.

A becquerel is a measure of the radioactivity a substance is emitting, a measure of the potential danger. There is no real danger from radiation unless you get too close to it -- or it gets too close to you, especially from inhalation or ingestion.   
Nobody Knows If It Will Get Worse, Get Better, or Just Stay Bad
The water flow through the Fukushima accident site is substantial and constant, both from groundwater and from water pumped into the reactors and fuel pools to prevent further meltdowns.

In an effort to prevent the water from reaching the ocean, TEPCO is building what amounts to a huge, underground dike -- "a deeply sunken coastal containment wall."  The NRA is calling on TEPCO to finish the project before its scheduled 2015 completion date.

Meanwhile, radiation levels remain high and no one knows for sure how to bring them down, or even if they can be brought down by any means other than waiting however long it takes.    

xa. Judge: Chevron can access its critics' private user information
Posted July 08, 2013 by Marissa Vahlsing

After more than eight months of silence, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan recently issued a long-awaited decision on the enforceability of a subpoena served by Chevron on Microsoft in connection with Chevron’s lawsuit claiming that it has been the victim of a conspiracy in the $18.2 billion judgment against it for massive environmental contamination in Ecuador. But Kaplan’s decision begs more questions than it answers.

The sweeping subpoena was one of three issued to Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, demanding IP usage records and identity information for the holders of more than 100 email accounts, including environmental activists, journalists and attorneys. Chevron’s subpoena sought personal information about every account holder and the IP addresses associated with every login to each account over a nine-year period.

This could allow Chevron to determine the countries, states, cities or even buildings where the account-holders were checking their email so as to “infer the movements of the users over the relevant period and might permit Chevron to makes inferences about some of the user’s professional and personal relationships.” (see Order, below, p6). Confronted with this affront to their privacy and rights of speech and association, the account-holders, represented by ERI and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), brought “motions to quash” the subpoenas in courts in California and New York on First Amendment grounds.

Judge Kaplan, who presides over Chevron’s conspiracy lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, and who has been accused of prejudice against the Ecuadorians and their lawyers, managed to sit by “special designation” in the Northern District of New York so that he could decide the enforceability of the subpoena to Microsoft as well.

And decide he did. Kaplan’s decision upheld Chevron’s sweeping subpoena with an argument that is as breathtaking as the subpoena itself. According to Judge Kaplan, none of the account holders could benefit from First Amendment protections since the account holders had “not shown that they were U.S. citizens.”

Now, let’s break this down. The account-holders in this case were proceeding anonymously, which the First Amendment permits. Because of this, Judge Kaplan was provided with no information about the account holders’ residency or places of birth. It is somewhat amazing then, that Judge Kaplan assumed that the account holders were not U.S. citizens. As far as I know, a judge has never before made this assumption when presented with a First Amendment claim. We have to ask then: on what basis did Judge Kaplan reach out and make this assumption?

Whether or not this assumption was correct – and whether or not it matters – the account-holders were never given the chance to submit evidence on the question of their citizenship. Judge Kaplan is hoping he made a lucky guess, but First Amendment rights, and the account-holders they protect, are entitled to more respect than judicial guesswork.