This could not possible be a bad thing, right?
North Korea Claims It Has Successfully Tested Hydrogen Bomb
The United States and Japan have called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council after North Korea claimed to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, a senior U.N. official told ABC News.
Before North Korea's announcement, a magnitude-5.1 earthquake was measured in the country near the site of an earlier nuclear weapons test, officials said Tuesday night. The tremblor was detected about 12 miles from Sungjibaegam and the South Korean weather agency said indications were that it was "artificial."
“We have perfectly succeeded in testing our first hydrogen bomb,” an anchor said on North Korean state TV. “It was one hundred percent capable from our own wisdom, technology and power. We have now scientifically test-proved a miniaturized hydrogen bomb.”
After the announcement, North Korea state TV replayed an earlier statement made in December, about leader Kim Jong-un’s plans to test a hydrogen bomb. New footage from the December statement shows a photo of Kim Jong-un signing an authorization letter. John Kirby, a spokesman for the State Department, said in a statement, “We are aware of seismic activity on the Korean Peninsula in the vicinity of a known North Korean nuclear test site and have seen Pyongyang's claims of a nuclear test. We are monitoring and continuing to assess the situation in close coordination with our regional partners.
“While we cannot confirm these claims at this time, we condemn any violation of UN Security Council Resolutions and again call on North Korea to abide by its international obligations and commitments.”
North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006 and only twice since, not including today's unconfirmed test, Kirby said.
"We condemn any violation of UN Security Council Resolutions and again call on North Korea to abide by its international obligations and commitments," he added.
The site of Tuesday's quake is about 5 miles from the Punggye-ri nuclear site where a test was conducted in 2013.
A quake measured at the site at that time registered the same magnitude. It was later deemed to be a nuclear explosion.
U.S. officials said that they will send up specially equipped "sniffer" planes to determine whether a nuclear test was conducted and, if so, what kind of test was done.
One official said the United States doesn't believe North Korea has the capability for a hydrogen bomb but can't be certain until testing is conducted.
This could not possible be a bad thing, right?
Doctors can report some mentally ill patients to FBI under new gun control rule
Delivering on its promise to deliver "common sense" gun control, the Obama administration on Monday finalized a rule that enables health care providers to report the names of mentally ill patients to an FBI firearms background check system.
The action was one of a series of steps that President Barack Obama had called for in January 2013 in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings to curb gun violence, but the rule was not published until today.
Under the rule, which takes effect next month, for the first time health providers can disclose the information to the background check system without legal repercussions.
“The disclosure is restricted to limited demographic and certain other information needed for NICS purposes,” the rule states. Disclosure of diagnostic or clinical information is prohibited.
Paul Gionfriddo, chief executive of the mental health rights advocate Mental Health America, said he believes the White House strikes the right balance between the need to have this information shared with the FBI’s background check system and protecting individuals’ privacy.
Current law allows HIPAA exclusions for law enforcement purposes, but it's a broad exclusion.
“That could be a barn door opened quite wide if an administration really wanted to open it, and they didn’t,” Gionfriddo said. “The administration has taken great pain to try to clarify that there is very limited information that would be reported only within a very limited group.”
Since the Newtown shootings, the number of mental health records submitted to the FBI system has tripled to more than 3 million records, according to an analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety, a group promoting an end to gun violence. The FBI system resulted in more than 6,000 denials of firearm purchases because of mental health criteria.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/obama-gun-control-rule-mental-illness-217340#ixzz3wTLWDt7y
A Redaction Re-Visited: NSA Targeted “The Two Leading” Encryption Chips
On September 5, 2013, The Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica jointly reported — based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden — that the National Security Agency had compromised some of the encryption that is most commonly used to secure internet transactions. The NYT explained that NSA “has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the emails, web searches, internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world.” One 2010 memo described that “for the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies.”
In support of the reporting, all three papers published redacted portions of documents from the NSA along with its British counterpart, GCHQ. Prior to publication of the story, the NSA vehemently argued that any reporting of any kind on this program would jeopardize national security by alerting terrorists to the fact that encryption products had been successfully compromised. After the stories were published, U.S. officials aggressively attacked the newspapers for endangering national security and helping terrorists with these revelations.
All three newspapers reporting this story rejected those arguments prior to publication and decided to report the encryption-cracking successes. Then-NYT Executive Editor Jill Abramson described the decision to publish as “not a particularly anguished one” in light of the public interest in knowing about this program, and ProPublica editors published a lengthy explanation along with the story justifying their decision.
All three outlets, while reporting the anti-encryption efforts, redacted portions of the documents they published or described. One redaction in particular, found in the NYT documents, from the FY 2013 “black budget,” proved to be especially controversial among tech and security experts, as they believed that the specific identity of compromised encryption standards was being concealed by the redaction.
None of the documents in the Snowden archive identify all or even most of the encryption standards that had been targeted, and there was a concern that if an attempt were made to identify one or two of them, it could mislead the public into believing that the others were safe. There also seemed to be a concern among some editors that any attempt to identify specific encryption standards would enable terrorists to know which ones to avoid. One redaction in particular, from the NYT, was designed to strike this balance and was the one that became most controversial:
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/04/a-redaction-re-visited-nsa-targeted-the-two-leading-encryption-chips/
No comments:
Post a Comment