ACLU backs Nebraska man arrested for handing out religious fliers | Fox News

ACLU backs Nebraska man arrested for handing out religious fliers | Fox News: "The American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska said Wednesday that Larry Ball was on a public sidewalk and exercising his First Amendment rights when he handed out the fliers."

Russian aircraft buzz US Navy destroyer: How big a deal? - CSMonitor.com

Russian aircraft buzz US Navy destroyer: How big a deal? - CSMonitor.com: "During the cold war, these sorts of flybys “happened all the time,” says Christopher Harmer, a retired Navy officer who served as deputy director of future operations for the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet."

The NSA's Heartbleed Problem Is the Problem with the NSA | Cato Institute

The NSA's Heartbleed Problem Is the Problem with the NSA | Cato Institute: "The agency’s recently-disclosed minimization procedures permit “retention of all communications that are enciphered.” In other words, when NSA encounters encryption it can’t crack, it’s allowed to — and apparently does — vacuum up all that scrambled traffic and store it indefinitely, in hopes of finding a way to break into it months or years in the future. As security experts recently confirmed, Heartbleed can be used to steal a site’s master encryption keys — keys that would suddenly enable anyone with a huge database of encrypted traffic to unlock it, at least for the vast majority of sites that don’t practice what’s known as “forward security”, regularly generating new keys as a safeguard against retroactive exposure."



"That creates a huge dilemma for private sector security experts. Normally, when they discover a vulnerability of this magnitude, they want to give their colleagues a discreet heads-up before going public, ensuring that the techies at major sites have a few days to patch the hole before the whole world learns about it.



The geeks at NSA’s massive Information Assurance Directorate — the part of the agency tasked with protecting secrets and improving security — very much want to be in that loop. But they’re part of an organization that’s also dedicated to stealing secrets and breaking security. And security companies have been burned by cooperation with NSA before: the influential firm RSA trusted the agency to help them improve one of their popular security tools, only to discover via another set of Snowden documents that the spies had schemed to weaken the software instead.



Giving NSA advance warning of Heartbleed could help the agency protect all those government systems that were relying on OpenSSL to protect user data — but it also would aid them in exploiting the bug to compromise privacy and security on a massive scale in the window before the fix was widely deployed."

Another Phony Budget Debate :: The Mises Economics Blog: The Circle Bastiat

Another Phony Budget Debate :: The Mises Economics Blog: The Circle Bastiat: " Only in DC could a budget that increases spending by 3.5 percent per year instead of by 5.2 percent per year be attacked as a “slash-and-burn” plan."

Does the Paycheck Fairness Act help or hurt women? - Campaign for Liberty

Does the Paycheck Fairness Act help or hurt women? - Campaign for Liberty: "The Paycheck Fairness Act will make it harder for women to negotiate their own salaries, and for the company to respond to the needs and demands of those it employs. There are many conceivable reasons a woman might accept a lower salary: perhaps they’d like to market themselves competitively when coming back to work after raising children, or exchange lower pay for flexible hours. Under the Paycheck Fairness Act, these women will find themselves at a disadvantage."

New algorithm guesses SSNs using date and place of birth | Ars Technica

New algorithm guesses SSNs using date and place of birth | Ars Technica: "the authors estimate that even a moderate-sized botnet of 10,000 machines could successfully obtain identity verifications for younger residents of West Virginia at a rate of 47 a minute.

All of that requires that the botnet master have access to date and place of birth information, and a number of commercial services will happily provide that data for a price. But the authors also point out that it may not be necessary to pay; they cite a publication in progress that indicates it's easy to harvest a lot of that information from social networking sites like Facebook."

Taking from the poor to give to the rich - Campaign for Liberty

Taking from the poor to give to the rich - Campaign for Liberty: "The Affordable Care Act ultimately relies on the same redistributionist principle—taking extra money from the young and healthy and using it to subsidize the health care of our far wealthier and less healthy parents and grandparents.

All told, “more than 50 percent of federal benefits flow to the 13 percent of the population over 65”—the same segment of the population with forty-seven times young people’s income and net worth. This makes no sense."

Computer technical support call a year after laptop was stolen leads to burglary arrest | Fox News

Computer technical support call a year after laptop was stolen leads to burglary arrest | Fox News: "Mike Witonis got an email from Apple thanking him for calling customer service about his laptop computer. Problem is, someone had stolen it from him a year earlier."

After 25 years in prison, man exonerated of NYC murder committed while he was at Disney World | Fox News

After 25 years in prison, man exonerated of NYC murder committed while he was at Disney World | Fox News: "From the day of his 1989 arrest in a deadly New York City shooting, Jonathan Fleming said he had been more than 1,000 miles away, on a vacation at Disney World. Despite having documents to back him up, he was convicted of murder.

Prosecutors now agree with him, and Fleming left a Brooklyn court as a free man Tuesday after spending nearly a quarter-century behind bars.

Fleming, now 51, tearfully hugged his lawyers as relatives cheered, "Thank you, God!" after a judge dismissed the case. A key witness had recanted, newly found witnesses implicated someone else and prosecutors' review of authorities' files turned up documents supporting Fleming's alibi."



"Fleming had plane tickets, videos and postcards from his trip, said his lawyers, Anthony Mayol and Taylor Koss. But prosecutors at the time suggested he could have made a quick round-trip plane jaunt to be in New York, and a woman testified that she had seen him shoot Rush. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison and was due to have his first parole hearing soon.



The witness recanted her testimony soon after Fleming's 1990 conviction, saying she had lied so police would cut her loose for an unrelated arrest, but Fleming lost his appeals."



"Prosecutors' review produced a hotel receipt that Fleming paid in Florida about five hours before the shooting — a document that police evidently had found in Fleming's pocket when they arrested him. Prosecutors also found an October 1989 Orlando police letter to New York detectives, saying some employees at an Orlando hotel had told investigators they remembered Fleming.



Neither the receipt nor the police letter had been provided to Fleming's initial defense lawyer, despite rules that generally require investigators to turn over possibly exculpatory material."

EPA exposed humans to high levels of pollutants - Campaign for Liberty

EPA exposed humans to high levels of pollutants - Campaign for Liberty: "The agency conducted tests on people with health issues and the elderly, exposing them to high levels of potentially lethal pollutants, without disclosing the risks of cancer and death, according to a newly released government report.

These experiments exposed people, including those with asthma and heart problems, to dangerously high levels of toxic pollutants, including diesel fumes, reads a EPA inspector general report obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The EPA also exposed people with health issues to levels of pollutants up to 50 times greater than the agency says is safe for humans."