Archive for March, 2012

Illinois to Pass a Background Check Dating Bill

We all know that dating via the internet can be a potentially dangerous thing. There’s always that little fear factor that reminds you that after no matter how many emails or chatting, you still might not know who’s sitting behind the other computer screen. Online dating services have long been a concern for those who could get caught in some weird Nigerian scam and end up losing far more than just a date, and no matter how safe they claim to be, it’s still the internet, and if the internet has taught us anything at all, it’s that creepers and trolls lurk everywhere. To be honest, you really just need to watch Datelines: How to Catch a Predator to know this.

But in Illinois, legislators are taking an action in the form of a proposed bill to help protect its residents who are looking to find love. House Bill 4083 (HB 4083) ‘INTERNET DATING SAFETY ACT’ – would require online dating sites to clearly and conspicuously disclose to all Illinois members if they conduct criminal background checks. HB 4083 would also require Internet dating services to provide a safety awareness notification to all Illinois members of safer dating practices

Also, if an Internet dating service does not conduct criminal background checks on its members, the service shall disclose to all Illinois members that they do not conduct criminal background checks in two or more of the following forms: e-mail message, “click- through” acknowledgement, member profile, or signup page. If an Internet dating service does conduct criminal background checks on all members, the service shall disclose to all Illinois members on the website pages used when an Illinois member signs up that they conduct a criminal background check on each member. Whether criminal background checks are conducted or not, the disclosure shall be provided bold, capital letters in at least 12-point type.

Although, we also know that a cursory background check is still potentially faulty. No superficial background check is going to tell you all the states in which a crime was committed, the exact nature of those crimes, or even what kind of intentions the person has. That might sound ridiculous, but to be honest, I’ve seen people who have squeaky clean records who are the worst people in the world. They’re compulsive liars and have a habit of stealing and torturing small animals.

And this false sense of security is what people who oppose the bill are fearful of. Performing and advertising the act that online dating services across Illinois would more than likely lead to a misconception about a persons need for basic internet dating safety. And this could directly lead to an up rise in violent and nonviolent crimes that are facilitated through internet dating services.

Hopefully, with the passing of this bill, people don’t forget themselves or their protection when they go to look for love on a dating site, and it only helps funnel out the potential criminals lurking on them.

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The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.

In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.

UTAH DATA CENTER
When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility in Bluale will encompass 1 million square feet.

1 Visitor control center
A $9.7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access.

2 Administration
Designated space for technical support and administrative personnel.

3 Data halls
Four 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers.

4 Backup generators and fuel tanks
Can power the center for at least three days.

5 Water storage and pumping
Able to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day.

6 Chiller plant
About 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep servers from overheating.

7 Power substation
An electrical substation to meet the center’s estimated 65-megawatt demand.

8 Security
Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.

Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Conceptual Site plan

A swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of January 6, 2011, mixing with a weeklong coating of heavy gray smog. Red air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the bone-chilling twenties. “What I smell and taste is like coal smoke,” complained one local blogger that day. At the city’s international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency’s highest-ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.

A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed “the spy center.” Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? “Absolutely not,” he said with a self-conscious half laugh. “Nor do I want them spying on me.”

For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly classified.”

And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country’s human and electronic spies.

Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. “We’ve been asked not to talk about the project,” Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.

Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.

Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”

The NSA’S SPY NETWORK
Once it’s operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA’s cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA’s code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world. Here’s how the data center appears to fit into the NSA’s global puzzle.—J.B.

1 Geostationary satellites
Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. Onboard software acts as the first filter in the collection process, targeting only key regions, countries, cities, and phone numbers or email.

2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado
Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.

3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia
Focuses on intercepts from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Codenamed Sweet Tea, the facility has been massively expanded and now consists of a 604,000-square-foot operations building for up to 4,000 intercept operators, analysts, and other specialists.

4 NSA Texas, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio
Focuses on intercepts from Latin America and, since 9/11, the Middle East and Europe. Some 2,000 workers staff the operation. The NSA recently completed a $100 million renovation on a mega-data center here—a backup storage facility for the Utah Data Center.

5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu
Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700 employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.

6 Domestic listening posts
The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom “switches,” gaining access to domestic traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20 such installations.

7 Overseas listening posts
According to a knowledgeable intelligence source, the NSA has installed taps on at least a dozen of the major overseas communications links, each capable of eavesdropping on information passing by at a high data rate.

8 Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, Utah
At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA’s cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents.

9 Multiprogram Research Facility, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects.

10 NSA headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
Analysts here will access material stored at Bluffdale to prepare reports and recommendations that are sent to policymakers. To handle the increased data load, the NSA is also building an $896 million supercomputer here.

Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.

He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says. “That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.”

The eavesdropping on Americans doesn’t stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T’s powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek’s three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country’s communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company’s Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.

The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.

According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.

Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.” (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)

After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds, “they’re storing everything they gather.” And the agency is gathering as much as it can.

Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life.

The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.

But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.

Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. “I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process.” But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren’t interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—”transactions,” in NSA’s lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at “between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years.”

When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice’s inspector general. They were given the brush-off. “They said, oh, OK, we can’t comment,” Binney says.

Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.

There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits—it’s incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (1036).

Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. “We questioned it one time,” says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. “Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys.” According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, “You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.

So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.

The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High Productivity Computing Systems program, its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (1015) operations a second, known as a petaflop—the computer equivalent of breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast. About 25 miles from Knoxville, it is the “secret city” where uranium- 235 was extracted for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. Today, not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it’s engaged in a new secret war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed.

In 2004, as part of the supercomputing program, the Department of Energy established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for multiple agencies to join forces on the project. But in reality there would be two tracks, one unclassified, in which all of the scientific work would be public, and another top-secret, in which the NSA could pursue its own computer covertly. “For our purposes, they had to create a separate facility,” says a former senior NSA computer expert who worked on the project and is still associated with the agency. (He is one of three sources who described the program.) It was an expensive undertaking, but one the NSA was desperate to launch.

Known as the Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, the $41 million, five-story, 214,000-square-foot structure was built on a plot of land on the lab’s East Campus and completed in 2006. Behind the brick walls and green-tinted windows, 318 scientists, computer engineers, and other staff work in secret on the cryptanalytic applications of high-speed computing and other classified projects. The supercomputer center was named in honor of George R. Cotter, the NSA’s now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology program. Not that you’d know it. “There’s no sign on the door,” says the ex-NSA computer expert.

At the DOE’s unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a furious pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to cooperation with the closemouthed people in Building 5300. Nevertheless, the unclassified team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world’s fastest computer in 2009.

Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. “They made a big breakthrough,” says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA’s machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and running.

The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. “Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it,” he says. The reason? “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”

In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans’ personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. “Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you’ll find out a lot more of what you didn’t know—stuff we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous amount of information still in there.”

That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be broken tomorrow. “Then you can see what they were saying in the past,” he says. “By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.” The danger, the former official says, is that it’s not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it’s also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans’ email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade.

But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed is everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can break codes. The Data Encryption Standard, the 56-bit predecessor to the AES, debuted in 1976 and lasted about 25 years. The AES made its first appearance in 2001 and is expected to remain strong and durable for at least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly built a computer that is considerably faster than machines in the unclassified arena, then the agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time. And with Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes along.

But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energy’s exascale computing initiative (the NSA’s budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. “The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities,” the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan’s “K Computer,” with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.

But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000 square feet, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in 2009, it will be an “unassuming facility with limited view from roads,” in keeping with the NSA’s desire for secrecy. And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.

In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.

Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions—the race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world’s knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it’s only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.

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Colorado has had several shootings in the past, the memory of Columbine has haunted the small town since the day it happened. 14 years later, Colorado Springs had another shooting in which 4 children were killed. Since then, some people began to have a stigma against guns and began to run “anti-gun” campaigns stating that if we ban guns, shootings will no longer happen at schools. But there were other people who defended the right to bear arms, stating that guns are already illegal in schools – but shootings continue to happen. According to pro-gun activists, banning guns is not going to achieve anything – “If you outlaw guns only the outlaws will have guns”

The debates escalated when Virginia Tech went through their first shooting, it was then that students began to protest and began to ask colleges to allow them to conceal carry guns, but the universities and local governments denied them. A second shooting happened, and students from across the country began to run similar campaigns asking for permission to carry their guns on campus. Finally, a year after Virginia’s second shooting; the students at the University of Colorado will be able to carry their weapons on campus.

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the University of Colorado system can no longer ban guns from campus, saying the policy violated state law.

Before Monday’s ruling, the university system had held its four campuses exempt from the state’s 2003 Concealed Carry Act, which barred licensed gun owners from packing heat in certain government buildings, private properties and elementary and high schools — but not college campuses.

In its ruling, the court said only “local governments” had the authority to adopt exemptions to the Concealed Carry Act, and the university board didn’t qualify.

UC-Boulder President Bruce Benson said in a statement he was “disappointed” in the decision, but that the school would comply.

David Burnett, a spokesman for Students for Concealed Carry, the group that brought the case, argued that strapped students would make college campuses safer.

“Gun-free policies are an open invitation to psychopaths,” Burnett said in a statement on the group’s website.

“Signs on the doors are an unenforceable lie that only robs licensed citizens of their ability to defend themselves. Until colleges can guarantee our safety, they can’t criminalize self-defense.”

Republican Sen. Greg Brophy agreed, telling local station KDVR that incidents such as the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, which left 33 dead, could have been stopped if other students had been armed.

But Democratic Rep. Claire Levy, of Boulder, told the station that schools should decide how to keep students safe, not the court. 33 dead, could have been stopped if other students had been armed.

“To say that more guns makes us more safe is wrong-headed,” she said. “What you’re asking for is violence.”

But when you look at statistics of people who have conceal carry permits, they don’t use the guns for violence. According to the Students for Concealed Carry, the Court’s decision will affect firearms policies on all of Colorado’s public college campuses. 220 campuses in six states already allow campus carry, without resulting injuries or deaths reported. “We expect other colleges to see the handwriting on the wall and comply with the court’s ruling,” said David Burnett, the national spokesman for the group. “If they refuse to adopt more reasonable policies, we may explore litigation against them as well.”

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Man slices rival’s penis

Blaise Fragione, 38, admits that in October 2008 he knocked out the victim, named only as “F.”, with a blow to the head, severed most of his penis with a razor knife and threw it in the toilet.

Fragione says that he “lost it” after F. came to tell him he was having a relationship with “Mado”, his partner of 14 years and mother of his two children.

“The sudden revelation of this adultery made him lose control,” said Fragione’s lawyer, Marc Ceccaldi. “He is well aware that he caused a significant trauma.”

Fragione faces up to 15 years in prison if found guilty of “aggravated assault accompanied by mutilation”.

The victim maintains that Fragione forced him to go to his home, where he tied him up and mutilated him.

F. is “extremely fragile… his life has been completely destroyed,” said his lawyer, Jorge Mendes Constante

The shortening of his penis to three centimetres (just over an inch) when flaccid and five centimetres when erect had resulted in “a deterioration of his self-perception, affecting his social, interpersonal and sex life.”

The victim is awaiting surgical reconstruction.

His former lover has returned to her original partner, whom she now plans to marry.

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30 Dolphins Rescued by Brazilian Beach Goers

On Monday, March 5, a group of locals and tourists united to save an estimated 30 dolphins from beaching themselves. The improvised rescue took place on the shores of Arraial do Cabo, Brazil, just north of the city of Rio De Janeiro.

While entire pods of dolphins are known to sometimes beach themselves, the occurrence is still not fully understood by experts. According to MSNBC, common dolphins will sometimes strand themselves in large numbers due to their tight social structure, even if they’re not sick. Luckily, this pod was in good health and managed to swim back out to sea with a little help from friendly beach goers.

30 Dolphins Rescued

In the stunning video above, you can watch the entire event unfold, as the dolphins move to shore, beach themselves, and are assisted safely back into the water.

FARGO, N.D. — “He came to us as Donald Douglas.”

That’s how Anni Adkins begins the story of how her two-person background checks firm in the Desert Southwest helped bring down what authorities call one of the largest high-tech bank robberies and one of the most complicated fraud investigations in U.S. history.

Donald Douglas, in reality, is Adekunle Adetiloye. Federal investigators said the 40-year-old Nigerian native living in Toronto helped organize a scheme that stole the identities of 38,000 people and bilked 600 credit card and bank accounts out of about $1.5 million.

Adetiloye is sitting in a Fargo jail, waiting to serve an 18-year prison term after pleading guilty to mail fraud.

Adkins and Joe Hoover are the owners and operators of Investigative Professionals LLC, based in New Mexico. They do background checks for individuals and companies, with about 450 members. Adkins told The Associated Press in a phone interview that she knows most of her clients.

She thought she knew Donald Douglas.

“He’s a very presentable young man,” Adkins said of Adetiloye. “I’m sure if he had taken his talents and developed a real business, he would have done real well.”

Instead, a federal judge is trying to figure out the amount of money that should be paid back to victims of the scheme.

Prosecutors said Adetiloye used the stolen identity of Donald Douglas to obtain corporate status and a business license from the state of Delaware for Syspac Financial Services, Inc., supposedly a debt collection company. Court documents show that Adetiloye had a Donald Douglas credit card in his wallet when he was arrested in Toronto on Dec., 1, 2007, kicking off the investigation in this case.

Adetiloye was able to access personal information of others through his membership with Investigative Professionals.

This image provided by Investigative Professionals on Sunday, March 4, 2012 was used for fingerprints and other evidence in the case of federal credit card fraud case that was tried in North Dakota. (AP Photo/Investigative Professionals) “We were like a middleman, basically,” Adkins said. “This guy is really smart, and he’s as much a con man as he is an identity thief.”

Adkins and Hoover said they were angered by the scam and worked with the feds for about six weeks at the end of 2008 and start of 2009. The company in a cat-and-mouse game was able to coax Adetiloye into mailing a money order that allowed investigators to obtain his fingerprints, among other evidence.

Adetiloye also left a voice mail message saying he was sending a check to Investigative Professionals for an account. Investigators told the company that the recording “was the nail in the guy’s coffin,” Adkins said.

The voice message ends with Donald Douglas wishing Adkins a merry Christmas.

U.S. Attorney Timothy Purdon, who released a statement following Adetiloye’s sentencing on Jan. 23, said earlier this week that prosecutors would no longer talk about the case. He would not give a reason.

However, U.S. Postal Service investigators said in emails to Adkins and Hoover that they provided “outstanding assistance to the investigation” and said their cooperation was invaluable.

The investigation picked up steam after it was discovered that Adetiloye was unemployed and receiving limited welfare, yet ponied up for a Range Rover vehicle, extended trips to England and an expensive condominium. Greg Krier, lead credit card fraud investigator for U.S. Bank, testified during the sentencing phase that it was the most complex case he had ever seen.

The case wound up in North Dakota after a U.S. Bank call center in Fargo intercepted calls from Adetiloye and others. Defense attorneys have claimed that Adetiloye’s participation in the scheme was minimal compared to others who were involved and he wasn’t a leader of the operation. Only Adetiloye has been charged.

“I didn’t realize their operation was so big. I was just happy to get one of them out of there,” Adkins said.

“We’re small potatoes in this whole thing, but we played a part,” Hoover said. “This falls into the category of civilians helping the government.”

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A federal appeals court has ruled it improper to compel a child pornography suspect to decrypt his hard drive because such an act would violate his Fifth Amendment rights.

The ruling (PDF) by the Atlanta-based US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of an unnamed suspect from Florida (known in court papers as “John Doe”) goes against US legal thinking in previous cases where courts held a person ought to be obliged to turn over encryption codes or passwords in a criminal investigation.

The appeals court ruled that: “[the] Fifth Amendment protects [the man’s] refusal to decrypt and produce the contents of the media devices”, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The US Fifth Amendment holds that no one “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”. But this protection against self-incrimination only goes so far.

Supreme Court rulings have previously found that a subject can be compelled to turn over a key to a safe containing potentially incriminating evidence, but is not obliged to supply the combination to a safe to investigators. US law is less clear on how this applies to encrypted files on computers (which might be considered akin to digital safes).

The US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling goes against two district court cases on whether the government can compel subjects of investigation to turn over either the passphrase or a plain text version of the data held on an encrypted drive.

Courts in Colorado and Vermont have previously held that the government can order suspects to turn over encryption passphrases, in certain circumstances.

In the case heard by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the suspect allegedly refused to supply the passphrases for five of his laptop hard drives and five external hard drives. His hard drives had been seized by police at the time of his arrest in a hotel room in October 2010, and encrypted using TrueCrypt, the court documents said.

The suspect refused to supply the passphrase in time for his appearance before a federal grand jury in Florida last April, the WSJ reported, and continued to refuse to do so in response to a later court order requiring him to decrypt the hard drives. A federal judge held the suspect in contempt of court but the appeal court overturned this ruling.

“We conclude that the decryption and production would be tantamount to testimony by Doe of his knowledge of the existence and location of potentially incriminating files; of his possession, control, and access to the encrypted portions of the drives; and of his capability to decrypt the files,” wrote Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat, one of the three judges hearing the appeal, in the ruling (PDF).

The ruling continued: “It is not enough for the Government to argue that the encrypted drives are capable of storing vast amounts of data, some of which may be incriminating. Just as a vault is capable of storing mountains of incriminating documents, that alone does not mean that it contains incriminating documents, or anything at all.”

The Vermont case, which came before the courts in 2009, also involved child pornography but authorities in that case said they already had evidence that the suspect’s drive contained child abuse material before they requested the courts to order the suspect to supply the passphrase for an encrypted portion of the disk.

In the Florida case, all the drives are fully encrypted and the police have no certain knowledge of what they contain.

In January, a federal judge in Colorado ordered a woman charged with fraud to hand over decryption keys to her computer. A regional appeals court rejected her appeal, and she was ordered to decrypt the information last week.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed representations on behalf on the defence in both the Florida and Colorado cases.

In a statement, the EFF welcomed the ruling in the Florida case. “The government’s attempt to force this man to decrypt his data put him in the Catch-22 the 5th Amendment was designed to prevent – having to choose between self-incrimination or risking contempt of court,” said EFF senior staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. “We’re pleased the appeals court recognised the important constitutional issues at stake here, and we hope this ruling will discourage the government from using abusive grand jury subpoenas to try to expose data people choose to protect with encryption.”

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Interpol arrests 25 ‘Anonymous’ hackers

Lyon – Interpol has arrested 25 suspected members of the ‘Anonymous’ hackers group in a swoop covering more than a dozen cities in Europe and Latin America, the global police body said on Tuesday.

“Operation Unmask was launched in mid-February following a series of co-ordinated cyber-attacks originating from Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain,” said Interpol, based in the French city of Lyon.

The statement cited attacks on the websites of the Colombian Ministry of Defence and the presidency, as well as on Chile’s Endesa electricity company and its National Library, among others.

The operation was carried out by police from Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain, the statement said, with 250 items of computer equipment and mobile phones seized in raids on 40 premises in 15 cities.

Police also seized credit cards and cash from the suspects, aged 17 to 40.

Sabotaging websites

“This operation shows that crime in the virtual world does have real consequences for those involved, and that the internet cannot be seen as a safe haven for criminal activity,” said Bernd Rossbach, Interpol’s acting director of police services.

However, it was not clear what evidence there was to prove those arrested were part of Anonymous, an extremely loose-knit international movement of online activists, or “hacktivists”.

Spanish police said earlier they had arrested four suspected hackers accused of sabotaging websites and publishing confidential data on the internet.

They were accused of hacking the websites of political parties and companies and adding fangs to the faces of leaders in photographs online, and publishing data identifying top officials’ security guards, Spanish police said.

The operation, carried out after trawling through computer logs in order to trace IP addresses, also netted 10 suspects in Argentina, six in Chile and five in Colombia, Spanish police said.

They said one of the suspects went by the nicknames Thunder and Pacotron and was suspected of running the computer network used by Anonymous in Spain and Latin America, via servers in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria.

He was arrested in the southern Spanish city of Malaga.

Defended WikiLeaks

Two of the suspects were in detention while one was bailed and the fourth was a minor who was left in the care of his parents.

In Santiago, deputy prefect Jaime Jara said police confiscated computer equipment belonging to five Chileans and a Colombian, aged between 17 and 23.

Jara said the suspects appeared to have hacked websites in Chile, Colombia and Spain.

The six suspects did not know each other and were released after voluntarily giving statements, police said, though they will likely be ordered to appear in court to face possible charges relating to online crimes.

Anonymous has in recent weeks targeted the websites of a series of police organisations, with subgroup “Antisec” on Friday vandalising the website of a major US prison contractor.

Anonymous took credit on Thursday for an online raid on the Los Angeles Police Canine Association and previously attacked websites of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Anonymous has notably defended WikiLeaks when it was facing a funding cut-off and recently collaborated with the anti-secrecy site for the release of a swathe of e-mails from Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor.

In December 2010, Anonymous attacked the websites of Mastercard, PayPal, Visa and others for blocking donations to WikiLeaks after it began releasing thousands of classified US diplomatic cables.

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Investigators are putting together a timeline of events that led to a Pittsburgh armored car driver allegedly killing his colleague and making off with $2.3 million, while a manhunt is now underway to find the culprit, who is carrying three automatic weapons.

Police are asking people across the country to be on the lookout for 22-year-old Kenneth Konias Jr., who they are describing as a cold-blooded killer that shot his co-worker Michael Haines in the back of the head and left him in the back of the Garda armored vehicle the two operated.

“Our belief is that he planned to rob the company, and if he had to kill the guard he planned to do that,” an officer said.

The two men worked for Garda Cash Logistics and were collecting cash from the Rivers Casino and a Home Depot in Pittsburgh. Just before 4 p.m. Tuesday Haines’ body was found inside the cargo area of the Garda armored vehicle, with a gunshot wound to the back of the head, and more than $2 million.

Pouring over surveillance video, investigators have created a timeline showing at least five collection stops made by Haines and Konias before the shooting.

Surveillance video shows the truck speeding away from a service road behind a Home Depot at 12:55 p.m. Tuesday. At 1:23 p.m. the armored vehicle was seen in a parking lot underneath a bridge. Three minutes later police say Konias ran to his 2002 Ford Explorer, and at sometime between 1:30 p.m. and 3:40 p.m. he returned to his home.

Police stumbled upon the abandoned armored car just before 4 p.m. and found blood dripping from its locked doors.

“He had at least a two-hour head start from the time he left work until the time Mr. Haines was discovered,” Cmd. Tom Stangrecki of the Pittsburgh Police Department said. “We’re not sure if he’s in the state.”

Konias’s father said that when he was home he discarded a bloodied uniform jacket, while police say that he took off with as many as three semi-automatic pistols, including one he allegedly took from Haines in the truck.

At some point Konias made a phone call to a friend, which was outlined in the criminal complaint charging him with homicide and robbery.

“At the time of this conversation with Kenneth Konias, Konias made statements such as, ‘I (expletive) up. My life is over,’” the criminal complaint stated.

After the friend asked Konias a series of questions probing what was wrong — whether he was having a bad day at work or had gotten a girl pregnant — the friend, who is identified as Witness #1 in the criminal complaint, said, “What, did you kill someone?”

After a few seconds of silence, Konias allegedly said “yes” and implored his friend to run away with him and live off the money from his heist.

Haines’ roommate of seven years, Joe Krsul, told ABCNews.com his friend and Konias worked together “a couple of times a week/” Haines never expressed concern about Konias, but said he preferred working with the veteran guards.

“He said he felt the younger guys didn’t know what they were doing,” Krsul said.

Darin Dinapoli, a friend of Haines, says that he does not want him to merely be remembered as a robbery victim.

“I want Mike to be remembered more as the genuine person that he is, and not just a guy that was shot in the back of a car,” Dinapoli said adding that he hopes Konias is apprehended soon. “If that guy is still out there, will you turn yourself in man.”

To become employed in the armored car service industry potential drivers must go through a screening process. Though it varies with different companies, the process often includes a criminal background check, reference checks and polygraph testing.

Garda, the company for which both men worked, is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the person responsible for Haines’ killing and for the return of the stolen funds.

“We are deeply saddened at the death of our colleague and extend our condolences to his family,” Garda said in a statement. “We are continuing to assist law enforcement in its investigation of this incident.”

Jim McGuffey, a security expert for 26 years, says this kind of robbery is a rare, but a deadly risk of the profession.

“You need firearms training, you need driver training, and you need basic guard training,” he told ABC News.”Unfortunately, you will have some bad guys slip through. This was just a horrific incident.”

Identity theft was the number one consumer complaint from consumers to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for the 12th year in a row.

The FTC tracks and records complaints into Consumer Sentinel, an online database used to track targets and research cases. Of more than 1.8 million complaints filed with the FTC in 2011, nearly 15 percent were identity theft complaints.

Twenty-five percent of those were tax or wage related, according to data from the FTC’s annual Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book released on Tuesday. The Miami-Ft. Lauderdale metro area ranked number one for most identity theft crimes.

Thirty percent of identity theft victims never notified police, according to Consumer Sentinel Data. However, Consumer Sentinel Data is accessible by law enforcement agencies for investigations. And data from Consumer Sentinel can be added by about a dozen other agencies, including the U.S. Postal Service Inspection Service, the Department of Justice Internet Crime Complaint Center, and all U.S. and Canadian members of the Better Business Bureau.

Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a new version of HTTPS Everywhere, a Web browsing tool for Firefox and Google Chrome browsers, that automatically encrypts communication with major Web sites to help protect user information from monitoring and hijacking of data that can lead to identity theft.

The new version, HTTPS Everywhere 2.0 for Firefox, has a feature that warns a user when they’re visiting a Web site that has security vulnerabilities, flagging sites that are vulnerable to eavesdropping or man in the middle attacks.

“In recent weeks, an unexpected weakness in the encryption used by many routers, firewalls and VPN devices made big news,” said EFF Technology Projects Director Peter Eckersley. “The new version of HTTPS Everywhere for Firefox will let users know when they connect to a website or device that has a security problem–including weak key problems like the ones that were disclosed two weeks ago–giving people the information they need to protect themselves.”

The browser extension has been downloaded in more than one million homes since its launch in 2010, according to an EFF press release distributed on Tuesday.

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