Loudernet

Federal health authorities recommended Monday that doctors suspend using Rotarix, one of two vaccines licensed in the United States against rotavirus, saying the vaccine is contaminated with material from a pig virus.

“There is no evidence at this time that this material poses a safety risk,” Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg told reporters in a conference call.

Rotarix, made by GlaxoSmithKline, was approved by the FDA in 2008. The contaminant material is DNA from porcine circovirus 1, a virus from pigs that is not known to cause disease in humans or animals, Hamburg said.

About 1 million children in the United States and about 30 million worldwide have gotten Rotarix vaccine, she said.

via Rotarix rotavirus vaccine contaminated, officials say – CNN.com.

An incident from 2008, brought to light recently by the Washington Post, reveals just how discombobulated our nation’s cybersecurity efforts actually are. A terrorist-tracking forum, created by the CIA and Saudi government, was shut down by the National Security Agency.

The message board was started by the CIA and Saudi government as a “honey pot” for gathering intelligence on extremist activities in the area. By all accounts, the strategy was working—the website saw significant terrorist traffic and provided a wealth of intelligence to both nations.

But according to the National Security Agency the site was a little too well-trafficked, and in 2008 it determined that the site was being used by terrorists to facilitate attacks against American forces in Iraq. A task force of officials convened and, despite the CIA’s objections and one official’s claim that the the NSA had no authority to do so, the plan to shut down the site went forward.

Taking down sites is tricky business, and along with the forum the Pentagon unit that was carrying out the operation accidentally took out 300 servers in Saudi Arabia, Germany and Texas. The Germans, as well as the Saudi officials who had lost a valuable intelligence resource, were not pleased with the disruption.

Cyberspace is a new, complex front that officials are still figuring out to defend. If the CIA’s website was in fact contributing to the death of American soldiers, then it makes sense that it was dismantled. But, as one researcher noted, “you can’t really shut down this process for more than 24 or 48 hours”—on the internet, where there's a will there’s a way—and the CIA maintains that the NSA only managed to drive the terrorist activity into the shadows of the net, where it can’t be as easily monitored.

Cybersecurity will only become more important going forward, so it’s good that we’re working out these kinks now. The internet is fundamentally a different kind of battlefield and securing it is a daunting task. But I’d imagine a good first step, for government agencies, would be getting on the same page. [Washington Post]

via The Department of Defense Covertly Dismantled a Terrorist Message Board…Created By the CIA – Terrorism – Gizmodo.

“It’s a deeply unsatisfactory and very worrying development,” a senior executive from an ISP told The Guardian.

“The fear is that no one will know what is being cooked-up before it becomes law. It’s legislation on the hoof.”

But this situation suits the BPI just fine. This week a leaked memo from the BPI fell into the hands of Cory Doctorow which showed that the “LibDem amendment” – a proposal under the DEB which would allow for websites to be blocked if, essentially, the BPI didn’t like their activities – was in fact written by the BPI. Very cosy.

But the controversies don’t end there. Doctorow also received an internal document prepared by the BPI’s Director of Public Affairs and prospective Labour parliamentary candidate, Richard Mollet. In the document he admitted that the only reason the DEB had a chance of passing is because MP’s are resigned to voting on it without debate.

Massive Protest Against UK Anti-Piracy Bill.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller alarmed technology and telecommunications firms last year when he announced a plan for the president to seize “emergency” control of the Internet. Now the West Virginia Democrat is trying again with a new version that aides hope will be seen as less extreme.

During a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill on Wednesday attended by about a dozen industry representatives, CNET has learned, Rockefeller’s staff pitched a revised version of his controversial cybersecurity legislation.

It says that after the president chooses to “declare a cybersecurity emergency,” he can activate a “response and restoration plan” involving networks owned and operated by the private sector. In an attempt to limit criticism, instead of spelling out the plan’s details, the latest draft simply says that it must be developed by the White House in advance.

via Emergency Internet control bill gets a rewrite | Politics and Law – CNET News.

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran has arrested 30 people suspected of belonging to a U.S.-linked cyber network gathering information on Iranian nuclear scientists and sending people abroad for training, a news agency reported on Saturday.

It said the group sought to recruit people through the Internet for training in Iraq with the People’s Mujahideen Organisation, a leftist exile group which launched attacks on the Islamic Republic from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq

“Thirty people were arrested in connection with an organised American cyber war network via a series of complex security measures in the field of information technology and communications,” the Fars news agency said.

via Iran arrests 30 over U.S.-linked cyber ring – agency.

Former Minnesota governor and one-time professional wrestler Jesse Ventura has run afoul of the Huffington Post’s no-conspiracy-theory policy, and he’s not happy about it.

“I can’t believe the Huffington Post today will practice censorship,” Ventura says in astonishment. “I’ve got news for them. … I won’t ever write for ‘em again.”

Ventura had posted an item on Tuesday which took note of a recent conference at which “more than one thousand architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11.” He also quoted a few paragraphs from his new book, American Conspiracies, to explain why some of those experts see signs of controlled demolition.

via Ventura: ‘You’re not allowed to ask’ about 9/11 | Raw Story.

Lee DeCovnick

All United States citizens may be required to carry a biometric I.D. card!

That’s not Orwell’s Big Brother speaking. Rather Democrat Chuck Schumer (D- New York), and Republican Lindsay Graham (R- South Carolina) have devised new legislation to mandate that every worker carry a government I.D. card to prove his citizenship. The card must be carried every day and may be checked by employers and any governmental authority upon request.

All U.S. citizens would be required to carry an ID cards according to this plan. It’s meant to keep companies from hiring illegal immigrants. No matter where you apply for a job, under the plan, you would have to have a card carrying bio-metric information on a microchip. It’s like your fingerprints, or a scan of the veins in your hands.

via American Thinker Blog: Show me your papers.

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

Anglering for access united we fish rally capitol washington fishing

AP/Luis M. AlvarezOne sign at the United We Fish rally at the Capital summed up the feelings of recreational and commercial fishermen.

This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.

That’s a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning.

“When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario,” said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano.

via Obama moving to limit fishing access – ESPN.

March 07, 2010, Sandrine Rastello and Omar R. Valdimarsson

March 7 (Bloomberg) — International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss Kahn said the lender is “committed to help Iceland” and its deposit guarantee dispute with the U.K. and the Netherlands is a “private” matter.

Icelanders rejected a bill that would saddle each citizen with $16,400 of debt in protest at U.K. and Dutch demands that they cover losses triggered by the failure of Landsbanki Islands hf in October 2008. With 98.3 percent of votes counted, 93.5 percent rejected the bill which would have obliged the island to take on $5.3 billion in loans from the U.K. and Netherlands to compensate the two countries for depositor losses.

via Strauss-Kahn Says Wants to Aid Iceland, Calls Dispute ‘Private’ – BusinessWeek.

Mar 5 2010, 3:40 PM ET

Why is the national security community treating the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010,” introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration’s choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read the bill here, and then read the summarized points after the jump.

According to the summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.

(There is no distinction between U.S. persons–visa holders or citizens–and non-U.S. persons.)

It would require these “belligerents” to be coded as “high-value detainee[s]” to be held in military custody and interrogated for their intelligence value by a High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team established by the president. (The H.I.G., of course, was established to bring a sophisticated interrogation capacity to the federal justice system.)

via A Detention Bill You Ought to Read More Carefully – Politics – The Atlantic.