Crime

This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult

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Image: This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult

Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person’s car—and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it’s weird that you ate in last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior.

 

IDI, a year-old company in the so-called data-fusion business, is the first to centralize and weaponize all that information for its customers. The Boca Raton, Fla., company’s database service, idiCORE, combines public records with purchasing, demographic, and behavioral data. Chief Executive Officer Derek Dubner says the system isn’t waiting for requests from clients—it’s already built a profile on every American adult, including young people who wouldn’t be swept up in conventional databases, which only index transactions. “We have data on that 21-year-old who’s living at home with mom and dad,” he says.

Dubner declined to provide a demo of idiCORE or furnish the company’s report on me. But he says these personal profiles include all known addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses; every piece of property ever bought or sold, plus related mortgages; past and present vehicles owned; criminal citations, from speeding tickets on up; voter registration; hunting permits; and names and phone numbers of neighbors. The reports also include photos of cars taken by private companies using automated license plate readers—billions of snapshots tagged with GPS coordinates and time stamps to help PIs surveil people or bust alibis.

IDI also runs two coupon websites, allamericansavings.com and samplesandsavings.com, that collect purchasing and behavioral data. When I signed up for the latter, I was asked for my e-mail address, birthday, and home address, information that could easily link me with my idiCORE profile. The site also asked if I suffered from arthritis, asthma, diabetes, or depression, ostensibly to help tailor its discounts.

Users and industry analysts say the addition of purchasing and behavioral data to conventional data fusion outmatches rival systems in terms of capabilities—and creepiness. “The cloud never forgets, and imperfect pictures of you composed from your data profile are carefully filled in over time,” says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a consulting firm. “We’re like bugs in amber, completely trapped in the web of our own data.”

When logging in to IDI and similar databases, a PI must select a permissible use for a search under U.S. privacy laws. The Federal Trade Commission oversees the industry, but PI companies are largely expected to police themselves, because a midsize outfit may run thousands of searches a month.

Dubner says most Americans have little to fear. As examples, he cites idiCORE uses such as locating a missing person and nabbing a fraud or terrorism suspect.

IDI, like much of the data-fusion industry, traces its lineage to Hank Asher, a former cocaine smuggler and self-taught programmer who began fusing sets of public data from state and federal governments in the early 1990s. After Sept. 11, law enforcement’s interest in commercial databases grew, and more money and data began raining down, says Julia Angwin, a reporter who wrote about the industry in her 2014 book,Dragnet Nation .

Asher died suddenly in 2013, leaving behind his company, the Last One (TLO), which credit bureau TransUnion bought in bankruptcy for $154 million. Asher’s disciples, including Dubner, left TLO and eventually teamed up with Michael Brauser, a former business partner of Asher’s, and billionaire health-care investor Phillip Frost. In May 2015, after a flurry of purchases and mergers, the group rebranded its database venture as IDI.

Besides pitching its databases to big-name PIs (Kroll, Control Risks), law firms, debt collectors, and government agencies, IDI says it’s also targeting consumer marketers. The 200-employee company had revenue of about $40 million in its most recent quarter and says 2,800 users signed up for idiCORE in the first month after its May release. It declined to provide more recent figures. The company’s data sets are growing, too. In December, Frost helped underwrite IDI’s $100 million acquisition of marketing profiler Fluent, which says it has 120 million profiles of U.S. consumers. In June, IDI bought ad platform Q Interactive for a reported $21 million in stock.

IDI may need Frost’s deep pockets for a while. The PI industry’s three favorite databases are owned by TransUnion and media giants Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters. “There’s no shortage,” says Chuck McLaughlin, chairman of the board of the World Association of Detectives, which has about 1,000 members. “The longer you’re in business, the more data you have, the better results.” He uses TLO and Tracers Information Specialists.

Steve Rambam, a PI who hosts Nowhere to Hide on the Investigation Discovery channel, says marketing data remains a niche monitoring tool compared with social media, but its power can be unparalleled. “You may not know what you do on a regular basis, but I know,” Rambam says. “I know it’s Thursday, you haven’t eaten Chinese food in two weeks, and I know you’re due.”

New evidence suggests the government is using NASA to air drop Lithium on the masses

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Need your mood tweaked a bit? Just step outside under the gaze of a chemtrail and inhale deeply. In addition to the barium, strontium, the nano bio apps and other assorted toxins, you’ll be ingesting a chemically tweaked Lithium, long known as a drug used for bi-polar disorder, depression and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. Gee, you won’t have to endure any more twenty minute sessions with your psychiatrist, am I right? Just walk outside under the haze and take a breath. Waking times has the story:

“There’s the official explanation for why NASA is spraying lithium, a pharmaceutical drug most often used to treat people with manic depression or bi-polar disorder, into our ionosphere, and then there is the probable reason(s). It would be easier to accept NASA’s official explanation if they were not so secretive about everything they study and do in space – but one thing is for certain – NASA’s own personnel have admitted that lithium, along with other chemicals, are intentionally being placed into our environment regularly. It is possible that many of NASA’s own employees aren’t even aware of the true motivations for carrying out such a project, ironically displaying the very behaviors that these chemicals/pharmaceuticals are meant to instill.

Image: New evidence suggests the government is using NASA to air drop Lithium on the masses

“In the first bomb-shell video a NASA employee (Douglas.e.rowland@nasa.gov) admits that lithium is being sprayed in the atmosphere, and says that it is ‘harmless to the environment.’”

It’s important to distinguish a difference between the type of chemically endowed Lithium force fed by sociopaths and the natural lithium found in most rocks on the earth.

The Global Healing Center reports:

“… Lithium is a naturally occurring mineral from the earth. Just like calcium and potassium, lithium is something that every human body requires.

“Many people are familiar with the pharmaceutical forms of lithium (lithium carbonate and lithium citrate), these aforementioned chemical extracts used to treat mania and depression.

“Lithium orotate is different. Whereas pharmaceutical drug forms of lithium require high doses to penetrate cells, lithium orotate is effective in extremely small serving sizes. Unlike its pharmaceutical counterparts, lithium orotate is non-toxic and seems to be effective for 70% to 80% of people who try it… Lithium [oratate] has been shown to protect the system from numerous toxins, particularly in the grey matter of the brain.”

Unfortunately, as with most decisions from the brotherhood of darkness, the kind of lithium being strewn about in the heavens is the medicating kind.

As reported by Waking Times:

“Here, to corroborate information being given by the NASA employee in the video, is the  Code 8440 RMMO which states the exact purpose of using Wallops Flight Facility to launch a rocket containing lithium thermite:

‘Purpose: The primary purpose of this mission was to test the loading methods for lithium canisters to be flown on the upcoming Kudeki (Kwajalein, April 2013) and Pfaff (Wallops, June 2013) missions, and verify their functionality under sounding rocket launch and space flight conditions.

Rocket Type:Two-stage Terrier MK70 Improved-Orion

Location:Wallops Range

Launcher:MRL

Date of Launch:January 29, 2013

Time:17:50 EST

Experiment results:Thermistor data looked nominal. Good report from airborne optical platform of recorded video and lithium clouds also visible by ground observation.’

… If you wanted to medicate the masses to create mindless, slave-like prisoners who didn’t even know they were imprisoned, this is surely a good way to do it. Spraying lithium into our skies, along with countless other bacteria, viruses, prions, parasites, fungi, carcinogens, toxins, hormone-altering drugs, anti-flora and anti-fauna, as well as gene-altering micro-dust is nothing more than bio-warfare against the world’s citizenry.”

Let’s not forget the assault on our food, either.

Monsanto’s Roundup system threatens extinction of monarch butterflies .

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Reuters / Michael Fiala

Monsanto’s Roundup Ready system – a potent herbicide combined with genetically-modified seeds that can withstand it – has decimated the monarch butterfly’s only source of food in the Midwest, putting it on the edge of extinction, according to a new study.

Biotechnology conglomerate Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup has become the most common herbicide in American agriculture today, used in tandem with the company’s genetically-engineered Roundup Ready crops.

Since its heavy proliferation began in the 1990s, glyphosate has been a leading killer of 99 percent of milkweed in the Midwest’s corn and soybean fields. Glyphosate-sensitive milkweed plants are the only spots where monarchs lay eggs, as the plant is the only food source for monarch larvae.

According to the Center for Food Safety’s new report, “Monarchs in Peril: Herbicide-Resistant Crops and the Decline of Monarch Butterflies in North America,” these conditions have contributed to a drastic 90-percent drop in population for monarchs in their main habitat, crop fields in the Midwest.

“This report is a wake-up call. This iconic species is on the verge of extinction because of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crop system,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director for the Center for Food Safety.

“To let the monarch butterfly die out in order to allow Monsanto to sell its signature herbicide for a few more years is simply shameful.”

As Monsanto is on the precipice of receiving US government approval for its next generation of the Roundup Ready system, the report raises the question of how much longer will the monarch survive?

“Milkweed growing in Midwest cropland is essential to the monarch’s continued survival. Without milkweed, we’ll have no monarchs,” said Dr. Martha Crouch, a biologist for the Center for Food Safety and a co-author of the report.

“Very few of us fully understand the ecological impacts of our food system, but we need to pay attention. The decline of the monarch is a stark reminder that the way we farm matters.”

The Center for Food Safety said it was presenting the new report “to Congress today at an expert briefing on the decline of monarchs.”

In December, the US Fish and Wildlife Service said it may designate the monarch as a threatened species under the US Endangered Species Act. The agency review comes in response to a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Center for Food Safety, and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation to list the subspecies of monarch (Danaus plexippus plexippus).

Disregarding their natural beauty, monarch butterflies play an important role in ecology. They carry pollen from plant to plant, helping fruits and flowers to produce new seeds. In their caterpillar stage, they are a food source for birds, mammals, and other insects.

While milkweed can grow away from main cropland, there is an increasingly low amount of habitat that can support monarchs. Herbicide spraying over corn and soybeans fields that dominate the Midwestern Corn Belt leave monarchs to search for milkweed in other areas like roadsides and pastures, according to the report. Monarchs also produce four times more eggs per plant on milkweed growing in a crop field as opposed to milkweed sprouting elsewhere, the Center for Food Safety claimed.

Monarchs are also threatened by global climate change, drought and heat waves, other pesticides, urban sprawl, and logging on their Mexican wintering grounds. Scientists have predicted that the monarch’s entire winter range in Mexico and large parts of its summer range in the states could become unsuitable due to these threats.

The report said that as monarch population sinks, they will likely become more susceptible to remarkable weather events.

The Center for Food Safety listed a host of policy recommendations in the report, including that the US Department of Agriculture should “reject applications to approve new herbicide-resistant crops, and [US Environmental Protection Agency] should deny registrations of herbicides for use on them, unless or until appropriate restrictions are enacted to ameliorate their harms to milkweeds, monarchs and pollinators.”

“Glyphosate is the monarch’s enemy number one. To save this remarkable species, we must quickly boost milkweed populations and curtail the use of herbicide-resistant crop systems,” said Bill Freese, a co-author of the report.

As RT reported last month, the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service approved Monsanto’s new GMO cotton and soybean plants. The company now awaits approval from the Environmental Protection Agency for it latest herbicide – a mix of the formidable chemical dicamba and glyphosate, which the company has developed for use on the newly-approved GMO crops.

The new GMO crops – coupled with the dicamba/glyphosate cocktail – make up what Monsanto has dubbed the ‘Roundup Ready Xtend crop system,’ designed to trump super weeds that have evolved along with its Roundup biocide.

For its part, Monsanto says it is seeking alternatives for the monarch.

“At Monsanto, we’re committed to doing our part to protect these amazing butterflies. That’s why we are collaborating with experts from universities, nonprofits, and government agencies to help the monarch by restoring their habitat in Crop Reserve Program land, on-farm buffer strips, roadsides, utility rights-of way and government-owned land.”

Inmate’s family sues Ohio after ‘agonizing’ execution with untested drug protocol — RT USA

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Reuters / HandoutConvicted killer Dennis McGuire struggled noticeably for his life during a lengthy lethal injection procedure in Ohio on Thursday, and now his family plans to sue the state for violating his Constitutional rights.

A press conference is scheduled for Friday, where the executed man’s children, Amber and Dennis McGuire, and their attorneys will argue the state violated their father’s right to be free of “cruel and unusual punishment.”

In what amounted to an unusually long time for a lethal injection, it took McGuire about 25 minutes to die after being injected with an untested combination of drugs that had never been used before in an execution in the United States.

For about 10 minutes, the controversial cocktail of midazolam and hydromorphone resulted in McGuire “struggling and gasping loudly for air, making snorting and choking sounds that lasted for at least 10 minutes, with his chest heaving and his fist clenched. Deep, rattling sounds emanated from his mouth,” as reported by the Columbus Dispatch.

Soon after McGuire’s death, his attorney Allen Bohnert called the execution “a failed, agonizing experiment by the state of Ohio.”

“The court’s concerns expressed earlier this week have been confirmed,” Bohnert added, according to the Associated Press. “And more importantly, the people of the state of Ohio should be appalled at what was done here today in their names.”

Last week, Bohnert tried to argue that McGuire was at risk of “agony and terror” since the new drug combination could cut off his air supply as he died, but the plea ultimately failed as judges ruled in favor of the state.

The use of midazolam, in particular, has been called into question in the past, as critics believe it leaves inmates aware of their surroundings and in extreme pain as they die.

Dennis McGuire.(AFP Photo / Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction)Dennis McGuire.(AFP Photo / Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction)

“I watched his stomach heave,” said Amber McGuire in a statement, according to the Dispatch. “I watched him try to sit up against the straps on the gurney. I watched him repeatedly clench his fist. It appeared to me he was fighting for his life but suffocating.”

McGuire was originally convicted of raping and killing a pregnant Joy Stewart back in 1994. His pleas for clemency had been denied, and Stewart’s family issued the following statement on the situation surrounding McGuire’s death.

“There has been a lot of controversy regarding the drugs that are to be used in his execution, concern that he might feel terror, that he might suffer. As I recall the events preceding her death, forcing her from the car, attempting to rape her vaginally, sodomizing her, choking her, stabbing her, I know she suffered terror and pain. He is being treated far more humanely than he treated her.”

The behavior of Ohio and other states that condone the death penalty have come under fire since most of the companies that traditionally manufacture the drugs used in lethal injections – generally based in Europe and which are against capital punishment – have halted sales to state correctional departments.

In an effort to replace diminishing supplies of sedatives and paralytics, many states have begun experimenting with alternative drug mixtures, including products typically used to euthanize animals.

As the AP noted, Bohnert has urged Ohio Governor John Kasich to place a moratorium on executions following McGuire’s death. According to the Dispatch, at least one judge, Gregory L. Frost of the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, cast suspicion on the state’s behavior concerning executions in 2013.

“Ohio has been in a dubious cycle of defending often indefensible conduct, subsequently reforming its protocol when called on that conduct, and then failing to follow through on its own reforms,” he wrote in an unrelated case last year.

 

Death row inmates now executed with drug cocktail used to euthanize animals.

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San Quentin Prison execution chamber, US (AFP Photo)

ham University and expert on the subject.

Compounding pharmacies, which create specialized pharmaceutical product meant to fit the needs of a patient, have begun producing the drugs for state authorities.

But because of the lack of transparency around the production process – one compounding pharmacy was responsible for a fatal meningitis outbreak in 2012 because of poor hygiene – prisoners argue that risky drug cocktails put them at risk of being subjected to “cruel and unusual punishment,” which is prohibited under the US Constitution.

Earlier this month three Texas-based death row prisoners filed a lawsuit arguing this type of pharmacy is “not subject to stringent FDA regulations” and is “one of the leading sources for counterfeit drugs entering the US,” the lawsuit reads, as quoted by AFP.

“There is a significant chance that [the pentobarbital] could be contaminated, creating a grave likelihood that the lethal injection process could be extremely painful, or harm or handicap plaintiffs without actually killing them,” it adds.

“Nobody really knows the quality of the drugs, because of the lack of oversight,” Denno told AFP.

Michael Yowell, who was convicted of murdering his parents 15 years ago, was executed in Texas Wednesday. He became the first inmate to be executed in Texas with pentobarbital since European nations halted production for this purpose. His lawyers unsuccessfully tried to stop him from being killed, saying the compounded factors in pentobarbital make the drug unpredictable and there have not been enough trials to guarantee the death is painless.

The states in question may find an applicable replacement for the short-term but, Denno argued, this development could be an indication that capital punishment is on the wane.

“How many times in this country can they change the way they execute?” she said. “There were more changes in lethal injections in the last 5 years than in the 25 preceding years.”

Yes, You Can Hack a Pacemaker (and Other Medical Devices Too).

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On Sunday’s episode of the Emmy award-winning show Homeland, the Vice President of the United States is assassinated by a group of terrorists that have hacked into the pacemaker controlling his heart. In an elaborate plot, they obtain the device’s unique identification number. They then are able to remotely take control and administer large electrical shocks, bringing on a fatal heart attack.

Viewers were shocked — many questioned if something like this was possible in real life. In short: Yes (except, the part about the attacker being halfway across the world is questionable). For years, researchers have been exposing enormous vulnerabilities in Internet-connected implanted medical devices.

There are millions of people who rely on these brilliant technologies to stay alive. But as we put more electronic devices into our bodies, there are serious security challenges that must be addressed. We are familiar with the threat that cyber-crime poses to the computers around us — however, we have not yet prepared for the threat it may pose to the computers inside of us.

Implanted devices have been around for decades, but only in the last decade have these devices become virtually accessible. While they allow for doctors to collect valuable data, many of these devices were distributed without any type of encryption or defensive mechanisms in place. Unlike a regular electronic device that can be loaded with new firmware, medical devices are embedded inside the body and require surgery for “full” updates. One of the greatest constraints to adding additional security features is the very limited amount of battery power available.

Thankfully, there have been no recorded cases of a death or injury resulting from a cyber attack on the body. All demonstrations so far have been conducted for research purposes only. But if somebody decides to use these methods for nefarious purposes, it may go undetected.

Marc Goodman, a global security expert and the track chair for Policy, Law and Ethics at Singularity University, explains just how difficult it is to detect these types of attacks. “Even if a case were to go to the coroner’s office for review,” he asks, “how many public medical examiners would be capable of conducting a complex computer forensics investigation?” Even more troubling was, “The evidence of medical device tampering might not even be located on the body, where the coroner is accustomed to finding it, but rather might be thousands of kilometers away, across an ocean on a foreign computer server.”

Since knowledge of these vulnerabilities became public in 2008, there have been rapid advancements in the types of hacking successfully attempted.

The equipment needed to hack a transmitter used to cost tens of thousands of dollars; last year a researcher hacked his insulin pump using an Arduino module that cost less than $20. Barnaby Jack, a security researcher at McAfee, in April demonstrated a system that could scan for and compromise insulin pumps that communicate wirelessly. With a push of a button on his laptop, he could have any pump within 300 feet dump its entire contents, without even needing to know the devices’ identification numbers. At a different conference, Jack showed how he reverse engineered a pacemaker and could deliver an 830-volt shock to a person’s device from 50 feet away — which he likened to an “anonymous assassination.”

There have also been some fascinating advancements in the emerging field of security for medical devices. Researchers have created a “noise” shield that can block out certain attacks — but have strangely run into problems with telecommunication companies looking to protect their frequencies. There have been the discussions of using ultrasound waves to determine the distance between a transmitted and medical device to prevent far-away attacks. Another team has developed biometric heartbeat sensors to allow devices within a body to communicate with each other, keeping out intruding devices and signals.

But these developments pale in comparison to the enormous difficulty of protecting against “medical cybercrime,” and the rest of the industry is falling badly behind.

In hospitals around the country there has been a dangerous rise of malware infections in computerized equipment. Many of these systems are running very old versions of Windows that are susceptible to viruses from years ago, and some manufacturers will not allow their equipment to be modified, even with security updates, partially due to regulatory restrictions. A solution to this problem requires a rethinking of the legal protections, the loosening of equipment guidelines, as well as increased disclosure to patients.

Government regulators have studied this issue and recommended that the FDA take these concerns into account when approving devices. This may be a helpful first step, but the government will not be able to keep up with the fast developments of cyber-crime. As the digital and physical world continue to come together, we are going to need an aggressive system of testing and updating these systems. The devices of yesterday were not created to protect against the threats of tomorrow.

Source:Forbes