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It is interesting to observe how the US government and major media are staying silent on the case of Bradley Manning, the 25-year-old private first-class in the Army who leaked a vast collection of classified documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. Those of us who consider him a true American hero for what he did can finally heave a sigh of relief now that the word "accused" need no longer be affixed to his whistleblower status. On February 28, before a military judge, Manning acknowledged responsibility for releasing the information and pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges facing...

Democrats and Republicans are debating whether an overhauled tax code should be as progressive as the current one, after the latest House GOP budget set up an aggressive framework for tax reform. Top Democrats are pushing to maintain the current progressivity in the code, after the party scored its long sought-after tax rate increase in the fiscal cliff deal. But with the top individual tax rate now 39.6 percent, some Republicans aren’t nearly as concerned about progressivity as they look to lower tax rates and eliminate tax preferences. “If this was easy, we’d have it done already,” said Rep. Pat...

"Portland terrorism arrest: Emails show connection between Portland city worker and Pakistan suicide attacker, feds say" SNIPPET: "At the beginning of 2006, Reaz Qadir Khan received an email from a man he knew, goading him about Khan's past devotion to seek martyrdom for Allah, authorities said."

They're having to completely clear the Chamber. Priceless lol!!!!!

This is a test... OK it is a challenge. I know there are multitudes of smart people who lurk and post here on FR. Well I've been dabbling in Ciphers and Codes. Why? Because a number of years back someone gave me the Cryptonomicon as a gift. It is a novel by Neal Stephenson. The story is hilarious yet based on actual historic fact. Places like Bletchley Park and people like Alan Turing loom large in the novel. If you are not familiar with the name or place it was where England broke the Enigma Code of the Germans in...

NOTE The following text is a quote: Brooklyn Resident from Albania Sentenced to 15 YearsÂ’ Imprisonment for Attempting to Support Terrorism U.S. AttorneyÂ’s Office January 08, 2013 Eastern District of New York Earlier today, at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn, New York, Agron Hasbajrami, an Albanian citizen and Brooklyn resident, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for attempting to provide material support to terrorists. Hasbajrami will be removed from the United States at the conclusion of his sentence. The sentence was announced by Loretta E. Lynch, United States Attorney for...

The intelligence agency GCHQ has dismissed claims that a coded message from the Second World War found tied to the remains of a pigeon in a chimney has been cracked. A team of Canadian researchers claimed earlier this month that the code contained details of German tank movements which had been sent by a British soldier. However, Michael Smith, a trustee of Bletchley Park, said the claims were "nonsense". He said the Canadian academics had used a World War 1 code from the First World War as the basis of their research. He said: "The idea that a World War...

NOTE The following text is a quote: Alabama Men Arrested on Terrorism Charges U.S. Attorney’s Office December 11, 2012 Southern District of Alabama MOBILE, AL—U.S. Attorney Kenyen R. Brown of the Southern District of Alabama and Stephen E. Richardson, Special Agent in Charge of the Mobile Division of the FBI, announced that Mohammad Abdul Rahman Abukhdair, 25, and Randy Wilson, also known as Rasheed Wilson, 25, both U.S. citizens living in Mobile, were arrested today on terrorism charges filed in the Southern District of Alabama. A criminal complaint signed on December 10, 2012, charges Abukhdair and Wilson with conspiring to...

Updated at 8 p.m. ET: NEW YORK - A suspected terrorist parked a van packed with what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb next to the Federal Reserve building in Lower Manhattan and tried to detonate it Wednesday morning before he was arrested in a terror sting operation, authorities said. The suspect, 21-year-old Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, is a Bangladeshi national who came to the U.S. on a student visa in January for the specific purpose of launching a terror attack here, authorities said. He allegedly told an undercover agent last month that he hoped the attack would disrupt...

RALEIGH, N.C. -- The man who hit nine people with a sport utility vehicle on the University of North Carolina's Chapel Hill campus wrote a letter to a television reporter saying he read the Quran's 114 chapters 15 times and found that the Muslim holy book justified the attack. ''I did not act out of hatred for Americans, but out of love for Allah instead,'' Mohammed Taheri-azar, 22, wrote in a letter to Amber Rupinta dated March 10 posted on WTVD's Web site. Police say that just before lunchtime March 3, Taheri-azar drove a rented 2006 Jeep Cherokee through the...

What would you do if you found a burly county agent in your bedroom, demanding that you cut your grass? Erica Masters of Martinez in Columbia County,near Augusta,captured such an encounter recently on her home surveillance camera when code compliance officer Jimmy Vowell entered her bedroom to demand she come out to sign a summons. "He let himself in and actually came through the house and into my bedroom and yelled at me to wake me up to let me know that I needed to come back outside and sign the violation notice," Masters told WJBF-TV News Channel 6 station...

It was Sept. 17, 1944. Eight young Hopi men thought about their families and peaceful villages in the high desert of Arizona -- thousands of miles away -- and prayed for a last time before they boarded ships and joined their units with the U.S. Army's 223rd Infantry Regiment, 81st Infantry Division, on the shores of Angaur Island, Palau. The mission was to take over the island and provide the U.S. military with a strategic location in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. But the Japanese intelligence had been so good at breaking military codes that the mission depended...

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — I thought my son would be much older before I had to tell him about the Black Male Code. He's only 12, still sleeping with stuffed animals, still afraid of the dark. But after the Trayvon Martin tragedy, I needed to explain to my child that soon people might be afraid of him. We were in the car on the way to school when a story about Martin came on the radio. "The guy who killed him should get arrested. The dead guy was unarmed!" my son said after hearing that neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman had...

Any conviction that open source software (OSS) is somehow inferior to proprietary code, or vice versa, depending on which side of the development fence you sit, is being dispelled by a report from Coverity.The company has been scanning millions of lines of open source code for its 2011 Coverity Scan Open Source Integrity Report. The results show that the free code quality is on a par with in-house-developed products.More thoroughly tested The company said that this year’s study has been massively upgraded with the introduction of the Coverity 5 development testing platform. The new analysis engine incorporates advances in static...

NK military changes communication system to avoid wiretaps DECEMBER 24, 2011 20:34 The South Korean military has obtained intelligence that top brass in North Korea are changing communication frequencies and encrypting system to avoid wiretapping. The move comes after South Korean media reported that Kim Jong Un, the successor to the late leader Kim Jong Il, gave his first order to his military just before the Dec. 19 announcement of his father`s death. A military source said Friday that the South Korean military has had trouble collecting special intelligence obtained by wiretapping North Korean telecommunications since South Korean media reported...

NOTE The following text is a quote: http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2011/alleged-terrorist-indicted-in-new-york-for-the-murder-of-five-american-soldiers Alleged Terrorist Indicted in New York for the Murder of Five American Soldiers U.S. Attorney’s Office December 09, 2011 Eastern District of New York NEW YORK—Today, a federal grand jury in Brooklyn, N.Y., returned an indictment charging Faruq Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa, 38, aka “Faruk Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa,” “Sayfildin Tahir Sharif” and “Tahir Sharif Sayfildin,” with aiding in the murder of five American soldiers in a suicide-bomb attack in Iraq in April 2009. Specifically, he is charged with the murders of Staff Sergeant Gary L. Woods, 24, of Lebanon Junction, Ky.; Sergeant First...

One of Barack Obama's job creation programs appears to be working – the number of federal government regulators along with their budgets has exploded since 2008. Total employment at the conglomeration of federal agencies responsible for enforcing compliance with the myriad of laws now exceeds 281,000 people.  That's an increase of 13 percent during a time when 27 million Americans find themselves unemployed, under-employed, or have completely given up even trying to find work.  The budgets at these same agencies have increased 16 percent during the same period to over $54 billion.With the expanded staffs, the agencies have ramped up...

A cryptic code sent by the Zodiac killer on November 8, 1969 to San Francisco Chronicle has baffled authorities for decades, until now. Now a 27-year-old man is claiming he cracked this code as well as the identity of the Zodiac killer, who murdered at least seven people in the late 60s. Corey Starliper of Tewksbury, Massachusetts, was intrigued by the case after watching a 2007 movie "Zodiac" about the killings. He claims to have spent nine hours working on cracking the code. "I found it exciting, that I was actually able to get into his head when nobody had...

The looming political showdown over raising the federal debt ceiling has generated a seemingly endless stream of punditry over winners and losers, key players versus back-benchers, and on-again, off-again "grand compromises." But beneath those ever-shifting currents lie bedrock fiscal issues: how to slow the pace of federal expenditures, reestablish long-term budgetary discipline, and reform our uncompetitive tax system without heaping heavier burdens on businesses or individuals. In their quest for a staggering $2.4 trillion debt increase, President Obama and his allies on Capitol Hill have weighed in with many responses to those issues - some good, more than a few...

~ EXCERPT ~ The battle over the federal deficit hasn’t flipped in favor of the Democrats. The GOP isn’t suddenly at grave risk of losing its House majority. But after two years of getting pummeled over spending and the size of government, Democrats now appear to have found a political weapon that’s capable of evening out the fight: Medicare. The popular entitlement program wasn’t the sole issue behind Kathy Hochul’s upset victory in a New York special election Tuesday night, but strategists in both parties say it was an important force. And for the first time since November, the idea...

NEW YORK – Recalling Dan Brown's bestselling novel "The Da Vinci Code," computer experts have discovered strange anomalies in the Obama birth record released by the White House. They include a different birth registration number that shows up in "hidden text," remnants of the short-form certificate apparently bleeding through the long-form and a "smiley face" in the registrar's stamp that does not show up on other recently issued Hawaii birth records. Curiously, in a simple process run by Optical Character Recognition software that reveals hidden text, the registration number 10611 turns up, instead of 10641, the number displayed on the...

The real mystery lurking in the chapel where Dan Brown set The Da Vinci Code. From the outside, the Rosslyn Chapel does not look like a suitable place to hide Jesus' head. It's not much bigger than a country church, standing inconspicuously on a small hill in the miniature Scottish town of Roslin, a few miles south of Edinburgh. Its Gothic pinnacles, flying buttresses, and pointed arches have been battered by 500 years of capricious weather, and for years it has been encased in an exoskeleton of scaffolding as restoration efforts plod along. Until recently, it was covered by a...

The September11 terror attacks in the US were staged to overcome disunity in al-Qa'ida, confidential computer records reveal. Alan Cullison reports on what happened after his laptop was wrecked while he was covering the combat in Afghanistan IN the autumn of 2001, I was one of scores of journalists who ventured into northern Afghanistan to write about the US-assisted war against the Taliban. After losing use of my computer in an accident, I scrawled stories by candlelight with a ballpoint pen and read dispatches to my editors at The Wall Street Journal over a satellite phone. When the Taliban's defences...

How many pages does it take to lay out the insanely complicated rules and requirements of our tax code? According to tax publisher CCH, the total number of pages devoted to federal tax code rules, IRS rulings, and regulations has grown to 72,536:It's no wonder that even the government's own experts and officials can't figure it out. Any system of rules that requires in excess 72,000 pages to explain and understand borders on useless. At this point it might as well be Calvinball. Via Cato's Chris Edwards.

In a study published last week by the Laffer Center, my colleagues Wayne Winegarden, John Childs and I estimate that these costs alone are a staggering $431 billion annually. This is a cost markup of 30 cents on every dollar paid in taxes. And this is not even a complete accounting of the costs of tax complexity.

WASHINGTON -- A lifelong fan of codes, Ricky McCormick wrote out two pages of letters, numbers and symbols and stuck them in his pocket. His body was found in a Missouri cornfield in the summer of 1999, those two sheets of paper still in his pants. ALPONTE GLSE - SE ERTE, one line read. Is that a coded plea for help? A reminder to pick up the laundry from the cleaners? The beginnings of a commentary on the weather in St. Louis? If you know, the FBI's top code-breaking unit wants your help in breaking McCormick's code - one that...

A lifelong fan of codes, Ricky McCormick wrote out two pages of letters, numbers and symbols and stuck them in his pocket. His body was found in a Missouri cornfield in the summer of 1999, those two sheets of paper still in his pants. ALPONTE GLSE - SE ERTE, one line read. Is that a coded plea for help? A reminder to pick up the laundry from the cleaners? The beginnings of a commentary on the weather in St. Louis? If you know, the FBI's top code-breaking unit wants your help in breaking McCormick's code — one that has baffled...

ATD At the Doctor's BFF: Best Friend Fell BTW: Bring the Wheelchair BYOT: Bring Your Own Teeth CMB: Covered by Medicare CUATSC: See you at the Senior Center DWI: Driving While Incontinent FWIW: Forgot Where I was FYI: Found Your Insulin GGPBL: Gotta Go, Pacemaker Battery Low HGBM: Had Good Bowel Movement GHA: Got Heartburn Again IMHO: Is My Hearing Aid On LMDO: Laughing My Dentures out LOL: Living on Lipitor OMSG: Oh My Sorry, Gas ROFL.CGU Rolling on the floor Laughing and Can't get UP SGGP: Sorry Gotta go Poop TTYL; Talk to You Louder WTP: Where's the prunces...

Part of the mystery behind an 'alien' book no one can read has at last been unraveled. Found in a chest of books outside Rome by a dealer in antique books, the Voynich manuscript is among literature's great mysteries. The book of aging parchment is written in alien characters, some resembling Latin letters, others unlike anything used in any known language, and arranged into what appear to be words and sentences -- except they don't resemble anything written or read by human beings. And for decades, the manuscript has mystified scientists. "Is it a code, a cipher of some kind?"...

While enthusiasts across the world pored over the Voynich manuscript, penned by an unknown author in a language no one understands, a research team at the University of Arizona solved one of its biggest mysteries: When was the book made?University of Arizona researchers have cracked one of the puzzles surrounding what has been called "the world's most mysterious manuscript" – the Voynich manuscript, a book filled with drawings and writings nobody has been able to make sense of to this day. Using radiocarbon dating, a team led by Greg Hodgins in the UA's department of physics has found the manuscript's...

Napolitano: Colored threats replaced by 'formal, detailed alerts' in three months By Jordy Yager - 01/27/11 03:42 PM ET Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced on Thursday that the department is planning to phase out its color-coded threat advisory system over the next three months. In its place, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to issue “formal, detailed alerts” about “a specific or credible terrorist threat” to law enforcement officials, private businesses – such as shopping malls or hotels – and the American public, depending on the nature of the threat. “These alerts will include a clear statement that...

WASHINGTON—Welcome to the world of the temporary tax code. In the late 1990s, there were typically fewer than a dozen tax provisions that had just a limited lease on life and needed to be renewed every year or so. Today there are 141. Now Congress, taking up a deal worked out between the Obama administration and Republican leaders, is poised to turn the whole personal income-tax system into something of a temporary structure. The plan embraces a broad range of provisions—an extension of Bush-era rates, a new estate-tax formula—but for only two years. A payroll-tax cut in the bill is...

It appears Mona Lisa, who has been captivating people for centuries, just got much more interesting. Art detectives have discovered that one of the world’s most famous paintings contains small letters and numbers put there intentionally by Leonardo Da Vinci: Hidden in the dark paint of her pupils are tiny letters and numbers, placed there by the artist Leonardo da Vinci and revealed only now thanks to high-­magnification techniques. Experts say the barely distinguishable letters and numbers represent something of a real-life Da Vinci code. The revelation could have come straight from the pages of Dan Brown’s best-seller The Da...

That was the despicable message Gold Star mom Debbie Lee got from Jodie Evans and her Code Pink organization regarding her son, Marc Alan Lee of the United States Navy, who was killed in action in 2006. She tells her heartbreaking story at Big Peace. Evans, a major Obama ally and fundraiser, is about to hold a fundraiser for California Democrat and gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown. In her spare time, she raises money for terrorists and other America-haters – with impunity. This includes helping launch the “peace flotillas” against Israel in order to help the Hamas terrorist organization, a project...

"Car bomb explodes in Derry" IRISH TIMES REPORTERS SNIPPET: "A car bomb has exploded outside a police station in the North. The blast occurred at about 3.20am in a taxi which had been parked outside Strand Road police station in Derry. Damage was caused to the station and the perimeter wall but no one was injured in the incident. The explosion follows a telephone warning that a device had been planted in front of the station. According to the PSNI, a taxi driver was approached by two men on Cook Street at about 3am, one of whom had a gun....

For those unfamiliar, a 'hash' is a computed summary of a longer piece of text. For instance, this entire article could be hashed to a simple 32-byte hash which can be used to guarantee that the text is unchanged as modifying a single character in the text would yield a totally different hash. The article from The Age infers the solution, without actually revealing it, noting that it is connected with the organisation's mission statement: "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and...

SNIPPET: "U.S. counterterrorism officials have linked one of the nation's most wanted terrorists to last year's thwarted plot to bomb the New York City subway system, authorities said Wednesday. Current and former counterterrorism officials said top al-Qaida operative Adnan Shukrijumah met with one of the would-be suicide bombers in a plot that Attorney General Eric Holder called one of the most dangerous since the 9/11 terror attacks."

When the towers of the World Trade Center fell on Sept. 11, 2001, Clarence Wolf Guts asked his son to call the U.S. Department of Defense to see if the country needed his code talking abilities to find Osama Bin Laden. Wolf Guts was in his late 70s at the time, so his son, Don Doyle, did not make the call, but said the request personified his father's love of country.

Note: The following text is a quote: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, March 18, 2010 Chicago Resident David Coleman Headley Pleads Guilty to Role in India and Denmark Terrorism Conspiracies Admits Conducting Surveillance for Lashkar e Tayyiba in Planning 2008 Mumbai Attacks David Coleman Headley, a U.S. citizen of partial Pakistani descent, pleaded guilty today to a dozen federal terrorism charges, admitting that he participated in planning the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, as well as later planning to attack a Danish newspaper. In pleading guilty to all 12 counts that were brought against him in December and were...

The following statement was prepared by Gathering of Eagles concerning Adam Kokesh. Kokesh is running for office in New Mexico. It is my belief that Adam Kokesh gave aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war. That means he is a traitor. And he is running for election as a GOP candidate in New Mexico. God help our nation.

Fox News and Judge Andrew Napolitano are shamelessly promoting a wartime traitor, Adam Kokesh of the communist front group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), as a Republican candidate for Congress.For the second time in recent months, Judge Napolitano has had Kokesh on his Fox News show, Freedom Watch, for a softball interview about Kokesh's Republican primary bid to represent New Mexico's 3rd District in the U.S. House of Representatives.There is no mention by Napolitano about Kokesh's involvement with terrorist supporting groups like IVAW and Code Pink, nor did Napolitano mention Kokesh's repeated disciplinary actions in the Marines that resulted...

U.S. Tax Court has ruled in favor of a Massachusetts taxpayer whose deduction for her sex change operation was rejected by the Internal Revenue Service. Rhiannon G. O’Donnabhain, a 65-year-old civil engineer who was born Robert Donovan, sued the IRS after it disallowed the $5,679 medical expense deduction she took on her 2001 taxes for the $21,741 she had spent on hormone therapy, sex reassignment and breast augmentation surgery. The IRS disallowed the deduction, claiming the surgery was merely cosmetic and not surgically necessary. Judge Joseph Gale allowed the expenses for sex reassignment surgery and hormone therapy, but agreed with...

A dogfight over software is intensifying as the Pentagon reaffirmed that it will not share with partner countries the sensitive code that controls Lockheed Martin's F-35 radar-evading jet fighter, according to an article published by Reuters. Britain, which funded about $2 billion of the F-35, is among eight countries that co-financed the system. Nonetheless, no country will receive the source code or the vital electronics that control everything from weapons integration to radar to flight dynamics, according to the article. The jet, known as the Joint Strike Fighter, can switch between air-to-ground and air-to-air missions in mid-flight, thanks to some...

<p>Laura Ingraham supports this Rally so hope that is good enough for everyone. The Tea Parties are also on board.</p>

The BBC show "Newsnight" aired a show a few days ago that delves into the code the Climatic Research Unit used to dupe and scare the masses: [VIDEO AT SITE]Newsbusters has a partial transcript: "This is the source code from the Climatic Research Unit," Susan Watts, science editor at the BBC explained. "John Graham-Cumming is a software engineer. He's not a skeptic on climate change, but he is shocked by what he's seen in the programming. He compared it with the code in the same language written by NASA." Graham-Cumming criticized the CRU programming for its lack of professionalism and...

Note: The following text is a quote: Former State Department Official and Wife Arrested for Serving as Illegal Agents of Cuba for Nearly 30 Years Couple Allegedly Conspired to Provide Classified Information to Cuban Government A former State Department official and his wife have been arrested on charges of serving as illegal agents of the Cuban government for nearly 30 years and conspiring to provide classified U.S. information to the Cuban government. The arrests were announced today by David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; Channing D. Phillips, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; Joseph Persichini, Jr.,...

United States Army Major Nidal Hasan told a radical cleric considered by authorities to be an al-Qaeda recruiter, "I can't wait to join you" in the afterlife, according to an American official with top secret access to 18 e-mails exchanged between Hasan and the cleric, Anwar al Awlaki, over a six month period between Dec. 2008 and June 2009.

SACRAMENTO -- Did Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office use a coded veto message to send the f-bomb to Tom Ammiano, soon after the San Francisco assemblyman made news by telling the governor to "kiss my gay ass"? Schwarzenegger's people say no. But the X-rated evidence is hard to miss in a message that Schwarzenegger sent to explain why he was vetoing an Ammiano bill dealing with financing for the Port of San Francisco. A straight reading of the guv's letter laments "the fact that major issues are overlooked while many unnecessary bills come to me for consideration," and concludes, "I believe...

SNIPPET: "Search at Grundy County plant called part of ongoing probe" SNIPPET: "But a source said the owner of the plant, which processes lamb and goat, was taken into custody at his home in Chicago. Documents and records were taken from the plant and from a Chicago travel agency on West Devon Avenue, also owned by the same person, the source said."

A MAN who established a sophisticated network of peepholes and cameras to spy on his flatmates has escaped a jail sentence after police were unable to crack an encryption code on his home computer. Rohan James Wyllie, 39, yesterday pleaded guilty in Southport District Court to charges of attempting to visually record one of his flatmates when she was in a private place without her consent. But police were unable to prove his elaborate surveillance system had actually been used. Wyllie's three flatmates, two women and a man, grew suspicious that he was up to something when they noticed lights...