Tuesday 1-20-15

DEA secretly tracked Americans’ calls for over a decade, document reveals

A new document reveals that the U.S. Department of Justice secretly kept track of Americans’ calls to foreign countries for more than a decade to track drug trafficking and other criminal activities.
The new database of stored calls was described in a filing Thursday in the case of a man accused of conspiring to unlawfully export goods to Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

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A Drug Enforcement Administration official said in the filing that the agency, which operates under the Justice Department, has long used administrative subpoenas — not federal court orders — to collect the metadata of U.S. calls to foreign countries “that were determined to have a demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities,” the Journal reported.

Although the court document only refers to outgoing calls, sources familiar with the program say it also collected data on incoming calls.
However, the program did not monitor the content of the conversations. The document did not identify the countries called or say how many countries were involved, but did mention Iran as one of the countries reached.
The program operated from 1990 until 2013, sources told The Journal, and the Justice Department said the database was deleted and has not been searched since 2013.

The database controlled by the DEA is reminiscent of one kept by the National Security Agency, but the NSA gathers both foreign and domestic calls and is authorized and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as opposed to the DEA program which merely issued administrative subpoenas that weren’t reviewed by a judge.
The latest discovery shows the government has “extended its use of bulk collection far beyond” terror and national security cases to ordinary criminal investigations, American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Patrick Toomey told The Journal.
Civil Liberties groups and lawmakers have called for an end to the program, saying it violates Americans’ privacy rights and courts are now weighing legal challenges to the program.
Saied Kashani, the lawyer in this case, has sought to have the phone evidence thrown out and said the government has “converted the war on drugs into a war on privacy,” The Journal reported.

 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/17/dea-secretly-tracked-americans-calls-for-over-a-de/#ixzz3PHwY89S6


Two more planets in our Solar System, say astronomers

Paris (AFP) - The Solar System has at least two more planets waiting to be discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto, Spanish and British astronomers say.

The official list of planets in our star system runs to eight, with gas giant Neptune the outermost.

Beyond Neptune, Pluto was relegated to the status of "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, although it is still championed by some as the most distant planet from the Sun.
In a study published in the latest issue of the British journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers propose that "at least two" planets lie beyond Pluto.
Their calculations are based on the unusual orbital behaviour of very distant space rocks called extreme trans-Neptunian objects, or ETNOs.
In theory, ETNOs should be dispersed in a band some 150 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun.
An AU, a measurement of Solar System distance, is the span between Earth and the Sun -- nearly 150 million kilometres (almost 93 million miles).
ETNOs should also be more or less on the same orbital plane as the Solar System planets.
But observations of about a dozen ETNOs have suggested a quite different picture, the study says.
If correct, they imply that ETNOs are scattered much more widely, at between 150 and 525 AU, and with an orbital inclination of about 20 degrees.
To explain this anomaly, the study suggests some very large objects -- planets -- must be in the neighbourhood and their gravitational force is bossing the much smaller ETNOs around.
"This excess of objects with unexpected orbital parameters makes us believe that some invisible forces are altering the distribution" of the ETNOs, said Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of the Complutense University of Madrid.
"The exact number is uncertain, given that the data we have is limited, but our calculations suggest that there are at least two planets, and probably more, within the confines of our Solar System," the Spanish scientific news agency Sinc quoted him as saying.
"If it is confirmed, our results may be truly revolutionary for astronomy."
So far, there is no direct evidence to substantiate the theory.

Marcos's team, which includes astrophysicists at the University of Cambridge, devised a model based on changes previously observed in the orbit of a comet called 96P/Machholz 1 when it came near Jupiter, the biggest planet in the Solar System.

Based on this model, the movement of the ETNOs was consistent with one planet at nearly 200 AU and another at about 250 AU, they said.

Last year, the ALMA advanced telescope, located in Chile's bone-dry Atacama desert, found that planets in other star systems can form hundreds of AU from their sun.

Neptune orbits at an average distance of about 30 AU, and Pluto, which has a highly eccentric orbit, circles the Sun at an average of about 40 AU.

http://news.yahoo.com/two-more-planets-solar-system-astronomers-134043845.html