SWAT officers expected to find a victim shot to death, drugs and a belligerent armed suspect when they surrounded the home of an unsuspecting couple, but found they were only a part of a false emergency call caused by a teenager who hacked into the county’s emergency response system, authorities said.

As officers swarmed the home with assault rifles, dogs and a helicopter, a Lake Forest couple and their two toddlers inside their home slept unsuspectingly.

On March 29 at 11:30 p.m., authorities allege, Randall Ellis, a 19-year-old from Mukilteo, Wash., hacked into the county’s 911 system from his home and placed a false emergency call, prompting a fully armed response to the home of an unsuspecting couple that could have ended tragically.

Everyone loves a good prank, but hacking the 911 system and getting someone's house raided by the SWAT team is way over the line.. This kid is going to get his ass nailed to the wall.

News: Washington state man hacked into 9-1-1 system leading to SWAT raid on innocent homeowner

Acidus wrote this great list of reasons to attend PhreakNIC. I will be there as well, and I look forward to seeing everyone.

PhreakNIC 0x0b

PhreakNIC is an annual gathering in Nashville, TN, for hackers, makers, security professionals, and general technology enthusiasts. Hours upon hours of both informative and entertaining presentations are given by volunteers and many areas are set up with the intent of encouraging socialization. In our 11th year, we are now the longest running non-commercial hacker convention in the United States.* PhreakNIC is organized by the Nashville 2600 Organization, which is a 501(c)(3) tax deductible charity. However, it takes many resources to organize, and help is given to PhreakNIC by other 2600 groups in the South East United States, as well as the Nashville Linux Users Group. Our thanks go out to all who contribute.

Phreaknic is this weekend in Nashville. If you have never been to Phreaknic before, or a hacking conference, or are getting burned out on some of the other security conferences I encourage you to make the drive to Nashville and come see the show. I've gone for the last 5 years and it is, without a doubt, my favorite small conference. I love going to Phreaknic because:

Its a hacker conference
Let face it, when you are eating freshly sliced roast beef and drinking at a open bar on Microsoft's tab, you are not at a hacker conference. There is a certain air of authenticity about a conference room full of ugly gray towers covered in peeling stickers with CRT monitors lighting the faces of a group of people huddled around it, typing excitedly on a keyboard. I sure love me my big east and big west cost cons, but most of them replaced this feeling long ago with sponsor tables and free bottled water. And there is something a little sad about that.

It's small.
This is good for many reason. First, you can easily meet up with people which is the big reason I go to cons. The speaker rooms aren't all over the place. Lunch trains don't end up being 20+ people. I'm not standing on a stage in front of 400 people with a good 30 feet between be and the front row. I don't have blinding lights in my eyes. I can see the crowd. I can talk with them, not at them.

It's cheap
I haven't paid to attend a hacker conference, in, well, I can't think of a time. However I do remember being a poor college student saving money so I could fly to NYC for Hope or to San Diego for Toorcon. I remember Tom or Mike or Matt giving me a place to crash on floors and couches and flea bag motels. I remember being poor and getting poorer to go to a conference. Phreaknic's price doesn't prohibit the smart (but poor) from attending and expanding their horizons and they should be saluted for that.

There is one track
I don't have to sacrifice one talk to see ano... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Why I'm going to Phreaknic

MemeStreams is an early social networking website, online community, and blog host that was established in 2001 by Industrial Memetics,[1] and particularly prominent among computer professionals.[2][3] It was cowritten by Tom Cross and Nick Levay.[3][4] The site employs a reputation system.[5]

Someone finally made a Wikipedia article about MemeStreams. If you're bored, give it an edit...

MemeStreams - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The oldest distillery in America is Scobeyville, New Jersey's Laird & Co., a producer of applejack. Known as "Jersey Lightning", applejack's long history in New Jersey includes once being used as currency to pay road construction crews during the colonial period.

Curse you, foul demon!

I love it!

Applejack. Yes, it's New Jersey. Just say Thank You.

A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it.

But contrary to recent assertions by Bush administration officials, the proportion of international traffic entering the United States is dropping, not increasing, experts say.

International phone and internet traffic flows through the United States largely because of pricing models established more than 100 years ago in the International Telecommunication Union to handle international phone calls. Under those ITU tariffs, smaller and developing countries charge higher fees to accept calls than the U.S.-based carriers do, which can make it cheaper to route phone calls through the United States than directly to a neighboring country.

Exchanges in Hong Kong and London are emerging as local hubs for Asian and European traffic, while new fiber cables running north and south from Japan around to Europe will divert traffic from the trans-America route. Meanwhile, more countries are building their own internal internet exchanges.

"Because the decisions are made by the private sector, you're always going to go the direction where you have the cheapest fiber," Woodcock says. "That's likely to be through the U.S. for a while yet, (but) that's changing as more and more fiber gets installed around South Asia."

The trend may leave U.S. spooks longing for a simpler time; like 1992, when the first -- and at the time, only -- internet exchange point, called MAE-East, was erected in Washington D.C.

"All the traffic in the world went through Washington," Woodcock says. "But it was coincidence that it was Washington, more or less, and it was private-sector. And it probably wasn't tapped for at least a couple of years."

I don't think it was luck and coincidence as much as it was convenience and forethought.

NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World

For their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.

Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize 2007

School: Did you really name your son Robert'); Drop Table Students;--?
Mom: Oh. Yes. Little Bobby Tables we call him
School: Well, we've lost this year's student records. I hope your happy.
Mom: and I hope you've learned to sanitize your database inputs.

HAHAHA! Sweet.

To be fair, you shouldn't sanitize user input, you should validate it.

And you thought O'Hare was a bad name...

A German citizen who said he was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and tortured in a prison in Afghanistan lost his last chance to seek redress in court today when the Supreme Court declined to consider his case.

The justices’ refusal to take the case of Khaled el-Masri let stand a March 2 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. That court upheld a 2006 decision by a federal district judge, who dismissed Mr. Masri’s lawsuit on the grounds that trying the case could expose state secrets.

The Supreme Court’s refusal, without comment, to take the case was not surprising, given that a three-judge panel for the Fourth Circuit was unanimous. Nevertheless, today’s announcement prompted immediate expressions of dismay, and it could exacerbate tensions between the United States and Germany.

The Fourth Circuit acknowledged the seriousness of the issues when it dismissed Mr. Masri’s suit. “We recognize the gravity of our conclusions that el-Masri must be denied a judicial forum for his complaint,” Judge Robert B. King wrote in March. “The inquiry is a difficult one, for it pits the judiciary’s search for truth against the executive’s duty to maintain the nation’s security.”

After 23 days, he said, he was turned over to C.I.A. operatives, who flew him to a secret C.I.A. prison in Kabul. There, Mr. Masri said, he was kept in a small, filthy cell and was shackled, drugged and beaten while being interrogated about his supposed ties to terrorist organizations. At the end of May 2004, Mr. Masri said, he was released in a remote part of Albania without ever having been charged with a crime.

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Torture Appeal - New York Times

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Rita Katz and the SITE Institute have been mentioned on MemeStreams often.

Looks like someone at the White House toasted SITE's humint...

Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets

The 2008 presidential contenders' online fund-raising tactics could encourage one gigantic phishing attack -- or at least a series of little debilitating nibbles that will destroy the campaigns' momentum online, says a noted online security researcher.

The growing volumes of money that the presidential campaigns are soliciting -- and receiving -- online are likely to prick up the ears of fraudsters sensing a great opportunity to cut in and divert passionate online politicos' financial support to their own pockets, says Christopher Soghoian, a graduate student in the school of Informatics at Indiana University in a new paper to be presented today in Washington, DC.

Online Campaign 2008: A Phishing Bonanza?