Tuesday 08-30-16

Well just a disclaimer on this next article, just to be clear if I had my way all child pornographers either purveyors or consumers would be locked away.  There comes a time when people that want to do right do wrong and over step their bounds and this is one.  Again I'm glad the perverts got caught and hope they spend years in jail and I hope they don't enjoy it.  Anyway

 

FBI’s massive porn sting puts internet privacy in crossfire

For two weeks in the spring of 2015, the FBI was one of the largest purveyors of child pornography on the internet.
After arresting the North Carolina administrator of The Playpen, a “dark web” child-pornography internet bulletin board, agents seized the site’s server and moved it to an FBI warehouse in Virginia.

 

They then initiated “Operation Pacifier,” a sting and computer-hacking operation of unparalleled scope that has thus far led to criminal charges against 186 people, including at least five in Washington state.

The investigation has sparked a growing social and legal controversy over the FBI’s tactics and the impact on internet privacy. Some critics have compared the sting to the notorious Operation Fast and Furious, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed the illegal sales of thousands of guns to drug smugglers, who later used them in crimes.
Defense attorneys and some legal scholars suggest the FBI committed more serious crimes than those they’ve arrested — distributing pornography, compared with viewing or receiving it.
Moreover, the FBI’s refusal to discuss Operation Pacifier and reveal exactly how it was conducted — even in court — has threatened some of the resulting criminal prosecutions. Last month, a federal judge in Tacoma suppressed the evidence obtained against a Vancouver, Wash., school district employee indicted in July 2015 on a charge of receiving child pornography because the FBI refused to reveal how it was gathered.
Similar motions are pending in other prosecutions in Washington and elsewhere around the country.
During the two weeks the FBI operated The Playpen, the bureau says visitors to the site accessed, posted or traded at least 48,000 images, 200 videos and 13,000 links to child pornography. At the same time, agents deployed a secret “Network Investigative Technique,” or NIT, to invade their computers, gather their personal information and send it back to the FBI.
According to court documents, between Feb. 20 and March 4, 2015, as many as 100,000 people logged onto the site, which was accessible only by using the anonymous “Tor” browser, which encrypts and routes internet traffic through thousands of other computers to hide the identity of a user.
Tor, which is used for private communications by government officials, lawyers, journalists, judges and others, was thought to be virtually uncrackable until news of the FBI’s operation became public.
Mozilla, the company that offers the Tor browser, asked the FBI to reveal its methods so it can be patched, warning in a court motion that, “absent great care, the security of millions of individuals using Mozilla’s Firefox internet browser could be put at risk” by its disclosure. The Tacoma judge denied the request.
Michaud’s attorney, Colin Fieman, a Tacoma-based federal public defender, is leading a “national defense working group” that is tracking and coordinating challenges to Operation Pacifier cases.
He says the overarching legal issue in all of the cases is the FBI’s decision to search and hack thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of computers around the world based on a single warrant obtained by agents in Virginia.

With few exceptions, Fieman says, the federal rules of criminal procedure require a warrant to be issued in the same district as the search to prevent unconstitutional government fishing expeditions. That, contends Fieman and others, is what has happened with Operation Pacifier.
The case has shown that the “FBI cannot be trusted with broad hacking powers,” Fieman said.
“There is no question that the internet poses serious challenges to law enforcement,” Fieman said.
But he believes that in its desire to overcome those challenges — and fight the scourge of child pornography — the agency “has lost its moral compass and is willing to ignore the rules and even break the law to extend its reach.”
Michaud and other defendants have also sought to have their charges dismissed due to “outrageous government conduct” over the FBI decision to take it over and leave the site running.
“It is impossible to reconcile the Playpen operation with the government’s own view of the harm caused by the distribution of child pornography,” Fieman wrote in motion to dismiss another Washington case filed last week. “The DOJ routinely emphasizes … that possessing and circulating pornographic images re-victimizes the children depicted in them.”

Federal prosecutors routinely seek more stringent sentences for the operators of child-porn websites, Fieman wrote.
Judge Bryan rejected that argument in the Michaud case, stating during a January hearing that agents were “trying to catch the bad guys, so to speak.”
“Whether they did it right is a different thing,” he said. “But they didn’t do it wrong as to be grossly shocking or outrageous to violate the universal sense of justice” and warrant dismissing the charges.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/fbis-massive-porn-sting-puts-internet-privacy-in-crossfire/

Study Finds Link Between Water Fluoridation And Diabetes

A recent mathematical model study has found a potential link between water fluoridation and type 2 diabetes.
A study from Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine used mathematical modeling to discover a connection between water fluoridation and a rise in diabetes in the United States between 2005 and 2010. The study, Community water fluoridation predicts increase in age-adjusted incidence and prevalence of diabetes in 22 states from 2005 and 2010, was published in the Journal of Water and Health in late May. The study investigated the hypothesis that added water fluoridation has contributed to diabetes incidence and prevalence in the United States.  Kyle Fluegge, author of the paper, concluded that “community water fluoridation is associated with epidemiological outcomes for diabetes.”
Medical Daily reported on the study:

The recent study reveals that fluoridation with sodium fluoride could be a contributing factor to the prevalence of diabetes in the United States, as the chemical is a known preservative of blood glucose. Type 2 diabetes is a growing epidemic in the country with incidence rates quadrupling in the past 32 years. In the study, the sole author of the paper, Kyle Fluegge, used mathematical models to analyze publicly available data on fluoride water levels and diabetes incidence.
‘The models look at the outcomes of [diabetes] incidence and prevalence being predicted by both natural and added fluoride,’ said Fluegge, who performed the study as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

 
When examining diabetes rates across 22 states, the study found a one milligram increase in average county fluoride levels predicted a 0.17 percent increase in age-adjusted diabetes prevalence. The study suggests that adding fluoride additives to water was “significantly associated with increases in diabetes between 2005 and 2010.” Interestingly, the link to diabetes was different depending on the type of fluoride additive used. The substances known by the name fluoride which are added to municipal water supplies are actually a combination of unpurified by-products of phosphate mining, namely hydrofluorosilicic acid, sodium fluorosilicate, and sodium fluoride.
When sodium fluoride and sodium fluorosilicate were used the increase in diabetes was observed. However,  fluorosilicic acid was associated with decreases in diabetes. Counties that do not add fluoride products, but instead rely only on naturally occurring calcium fluoride also maintained lower diabetes rates. Fluegge observed the positive link when he adjusted fluoride exposure levels to account for an estimated amount of tap water consumption per individual.

“The models present an interesting conclusion that the association of water fluoridation to diabetes outcomes depends on the adjusted per capita consumption of tap water,” Fluegge said. “Only using the concentration [of added fluoride] does not produce a similarly robust, consistent association.” This was the reason why Fluegge adjusted his calculations to incorporate tap water consumption rather than choosing the calculations that relied on “parts per million” measurements of fluoride in the water.
Fluegge says he does not believe the study should change water fluoridation policies just yet, but that this should be a wake-up call for more research on the association between water fluoridation and diabetes. “This is an ecological study. This means it is not appropriate to apply these findings directly to individuals,” stated Fluegge. “These are population-level associations being made in the context of an exploratory inquiry. And water is not the only direct source of fluoride; there are many other food sources produced with fluoridated water.”
Fluegge is correct that the average person comes into contact with fluoride products through showers, canned goods, pesticides, processed foods, and fluoridated toothpaste. In the United States, the process of purposefully lacing water with fluoride additives began in the 1940s. Every year thousands of tons of fluorosilicic acid is recovered from phosphoric acid plants and then used for water fluoridation. During this process the fluoride ion is created.
This process of taking waste from the phosphate industry and putting it into drinking water has long been criticized for its effects on human health, and that of the environment. It is well known that water fluoridation has led to dental fluorosis for millions of children. This discoloring of the teeth was called “cosmetically objectionable” by the Centers for Disease Control. Beyond the cosmetic effect, there have been a number of studies indicating health issues ranging from arthritis, brain problems, reduced thyroid or overactive  thyroid, kidney problems and bone cancers.
While proponents of water fluoridation have long pointed to an apparent drop in tooth decay in fluoridated nations as proof of its validity, those claims have been proven wrong by the World Health Organization. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has stated the fluoride in the water is directly related to better teeth quality; however, the WHO released its own study showing that tooth decay rates have dropped in all Western nations, whether fluoridated or not.
In 2015, Truth In Media reported that the Cochrane Collaboration, a global independent network of researchers, professionals, and patients, reviewed the most comprehensive, well-designed and reliable papers on fluoride, before analyzing and publishing their conclusion.

http://www.activistpost.com/2016/08/study-finds-link-water-fluoridation-diabetes.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ActivistPost+%28Activist+Post%29