Thursday, January 16, 2014
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News For The Day



Hackers: HealthCare.gov still riddled with potential security issues – NBC
Julianne Pepitone NBC News


Cybersecurity researchers slammed HealthCare.gov's security during a House hearing on Thursday morning, saying the site is still riddled with problems that could put consumers' sensitive health details at risk.

“The reason we’re concluding that this is so shockingly bad is that the issues across the site are so varied,” David Kennedy, founder of the information security firm TrustedSec, told NBC News. “You don’t even have to hack into the system to see big issues – which means there are [major problems] underneath.”

Kennedy was the first of a group of so-called "white-hat hackers" who testified before the House of Representatives Science Committee on Thursday. He previously appeared before the committee on November 19, when he said he was able to identify 18 major issues with the site – without even hacking into it.

“Nothing’s really changed since our November 19 testimony,” Kennedy said during the hearing. “In fact, it’s worse.”

Only half of one of those 18 issues on HealthCare.gov has been fixed since that November meeting, Kennedy said, and he has since learned of more problems with the site. A separate House Oversight committee hearing began Thursday morning with testimony expected from the Department of Health and Human Service's chief information security officer.

TrustedSec isn’t disclosing the specifics of how those vulnerabilities work, as they are active issues that hackers could exploit. But Kennedy did cite issues including the disclosure of user profiles and the “ability to access anyone’s eligibility report on the website without the need for any authentication or authorization.”
“Some issues still include critical or high-risk findings to personal information or risk of loss of confidentiality or integrity of the infrastructure itself,” Kennedy said in his written testimony. He also submitted statements from seven other security researchers who expressed serious concerns.

HealthCare.gov is run through the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS), which released a statement Thursday insisting the agency takes security concerns seriously and has a “robust system in place” to address potential issues.
“To date, there have been no successful security attacks on Healthcare.gov and no person or group has maliciously accessed personally identifiable information from the site,” CMS said in the statement, adding that it continually conducts security testing on the site.

The committee, which is chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), also heard testimony from Michael Gregg, the CEO of security consulting firm Superior Solutions.

Gregg discussed concerns about Healthcare.gov “going up fast,” comparing the process with those of private companies like Microsoft, which roll out products in waves and spend a lot of time testing them. Healthcare.gov didn’t follow that type of process, he said, and the data it contains is a goldmine.

“Hacking today is big business,” Gregg told the committee. “It’s no longer the lone hacker in the basement.”
When questioned by the panel, Gregg and Kennedy both said they would not put their personal information on HealthCare.gov.

The third of the three cybersecurity researchers on the panel disagreed. Waylon Krush, CEO of the security firm Lunarline, stressed that he would put his information on the site.

Krush explained that Lunarline has worked with federal clients, and he used his written testimony to lay out the six-step process that federal information systems use to mitigate risk.

He also criticized Kennedy and Gregg for engaging in what he called speculation, pointing out that “no one at this table” was involved in the setup and management of HealthCare.gov. What’s more, he added, because hacking into the system would be a crime, no one has – at least not legally -- looked deep into the site to fully understand its setup.

“Just as security critics lack the hands on knowledge necessary to make dramatic claims about the site's weaknesses, I cannot claim to understand all of Healthcare.gov's security intricacies,” Krush said in his written testimony.
Gregg argued that a third party should be assigned to do just that: plumb the depths of the site and figure out a way to fix the problems through “an independent assessment.”

Another security researcher, who was not a part of the committee hearing, was not as optimistic.

“If you build a house on a bad foundation and it’s sinking into a swamp, it’s really hard to pick up the house and rebuild the foundation,” said Alex McGeorge, a senior security researcher at Immunity Inc. Companies hire Immunity to hack into their own systems and show vulnerabilities.

“Security isn’t a bolt-on,” McGeorge said. “It’s not easy to retrofit once you have a system up and running.”

This week the Obama Administration booted the original IT contractor, CGI Federal, that managed Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal’s contract will not be renewed in February, and Accenture won the contract instead.

“From a security standpoint, one of the things that’s so interesting about this site is that it’s so dynamic -- and it’s changing quickly,” McGeorge said. “You’ve got so many hands in the pot.”

Unfortunately, “that is the exact opposite of how you create a secure site,” McGeorge said. 

There’s also an upside to the ever-changing nature of Healthcare.gov and its stewards: When the site is constantly shifting, it’s tougher for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities they found previously.
“It’s harder to hit a moving target,” McGeorge said. “But a moving target also makes more mistakes.”


The experts named in this article disagree among themselves about the problems that exist. The good news is that the original contractor has been replaced by a new one Accenture which hopefully will be better. Hopefully, Krush will be correct in saying that the other hackers are overestimating the failure of the system. I truly hope the database won't be hacked by malevolent outsiders and the patients data highjacked.





The mayor who rose from poverty to transform a Georgia town – NBC

By Jay Kernis, Producer, NBC News

RIVERDALE, Ga. --  In 1973, Evelyn Wynn-Dixon was standing at the Pryor Street Bridge overlooking Atlanta’s I-75, preparing to jump. She had four babies, no husband, no job and no self-esteem. At the time, she never would have believed what her life would become decades later. 

If she killed herself, she thought, her children “would be rich” from her insurance policy. “I saw a tractor-trailer comin’. I said, ‘I am not gonna be able to do that.’ So I went home and I had a .22. It had no bullets.”

She also tried over-dosing on aspirin and cutting her wrist, without success. After those suicide attempts, she says she heard her late mother’s voice telling her, “School is the answer.”

That’s when Wynn-Dixon says she decided to turn her life around.
Watch Maria Shriver's interview with Wynn-Dixon tonight on "Nightly News with Brian Williams"

She had been to college, but became pregnant early on and dropped out. So years later, wanting a new life for her children, she earned a nursing certificate, then a bachelor of science, a masters in social work and gerontology, and eventually, a Ph.D. in public health.  

Many times, she walked miles from her home to her classes, and worked a series of jobs -- cleaning and cooking among them -- to pay tuition and support her children.
In 2007, Wynn-Dixon ran for the office of mayor of Riverdale, Ga., a city of around 16,000 people at the edge of Atlanta. She was 58 years old at the time and had no political experience. After a campaign that cost $2,318.57, she was elected. Wynn-Dixon’s first term lasted until 2008, and during her second term, which runs until 2016, she ran unopposed.

NBC News' Special Anchor Maria Shriver interviewed the mayor as part of a series of stories covering “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink.” The report, co-authored by Shriver and The Center for American Progress, documents the estimated 42 million women across the country—and 28 million dependent children—who live at the edge of poverty and economic disaster.

Wynn-Dixon told NBC News that Riverdale needs more white-collar jobs, and she’d like to re-brand the town’s image as a great place to live.
So far, as mayor Wynn-Dixon has built a new city hall complex — including a new town hall, courtroom, gym and amphitheater--and cleaned up the town. She ended her first term with a balanced budget, and even a small surplus.

Chief of Police Samuel Patterson said that the mayor has encouraged citizens from all walks of life, from children to seniors, to get involved in the life of the town.
"Dr. Wynn-Dixon has been an absolute ambassador for the city,” Patterson said. “She has opened doors that otherwise would not have been opened, had it not been for her vivacious personality. She has done more for the city in her first term than most of the mayors we’ve had who were her predecessors."

And according to mayor pro tem An’cel Davis, her leadership style “brought the city together."
"She took over when the city was going through turbulent times—crime, changes in demographics, and economic challenges," Davis said. "She has sort of a mother personality about her — everybody is 'baby.' She has that mother image.”

The mayor’s children are grown now. Two of her sons attended the University of Georgia where they had considerable success as athletes. One later went to Harvard for his MBA. Her daughter, an attorney, is getting her Ph.D. Another son served a nine-year prison sentence, but earned his veterinarian degree while incarcerated.
Wynn-Dixon says she’ll run one more time, “If the people will have me.”  

“My zip code didn’t make me. My size didn’t make me," said Wynn-Dixon, who describes herself as “voluptuously full-figured." "It was the fact that I dared to get up. I kept saying, ‘This is not going to defeat me. I’m going to prove to people that I can make it.’”
And she did. 
 

This story gives a true example of what a woman with children can do with her life. She clearly is a hard worker, a scholar, a leader and a reformer, which the town of Riverdale, GA needed. I think her next project (after her next term as mayor) should be to write a book about her life and the things she has learned. The Shriver Report would be interesting to read.




Ohio killer executed with untested two-drug cocktail
By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News

An Ohio man who raped and stabbed to death a pregnant woman became the first person executed with a previously untested two-drug cocktail on Thursday, and witnesses reported he gasped for air for up to 15 minutes.

Dennis McGuire — whose argument that the new protocol could cause terrifying and agonizing air starvation were rejected by a federal judge earlier in the week — was pronounced dead at 10:53 a.m.

An Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution wrote that McGuire, 53, appeared to gasp several times and made several loud snorting or snoring sounds during a "prolonged" execution.

His stomach rose and fell several times as he repeatedly opened and shut his mouth — his adult children sobbing from a few feet away as they watched, the AP reported.

Another witness, Columbus Dispatch writer Alan Johnson, reported McGuire "gasped loudly for air for about 13 minutes prior to his death," his chest heaving and his fist clenched. "Deep, rattling sounds emanated from his chest."

Ohio adopted the new protocol  — a combination of the sedative midozolam and the painkiller hydropmorphone — after the manufacturer of the old drug, pentobarbital, stopped selling it for lethal injections.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment, said the reports from the death chamber could lead the state or the courts to scrap the new method.

"This doesn’t sound like it was a complete disaster but they don’t want anything that even has the appearance of someone suffering or a delay in death being carried out," Dieter said. "This is going to be looked at with good concern.'

Dieter said it is not unheard of for an execution to take 15 minutes or even longer, but if the prisoner was physically struggling much of that time, it could be seen as cruel.

"This sounds like more discomfort than they would want in carrying out an execution," he said.
In a statement, the family of victim Joy Stewart noted that she suffered terror and pain in her last moments.
"We have forgiven him, but that does not negate the need for him to pay for his actions," they said.

McGuire was convicted of raping, sodomizing and slashing the throat of 22-year-old Stewart, who was eight months pregnant at the time of her murder in 1989.
In a bid for clemency last month, McGuire's lawyers argued that he had been mentally, physically and sexually abused as a child, which affected his brain development.
After the Parole Board turned him down, McGuire tried to get his execution halted on the grounds that the two-drug method might lead to a condition called "air hunger" before his actual death.

The court rejected the argument even as it acknowledged that his execution would be an "experiment" that could go wrong.

McGuire had also asked Gov. John Kasich to delay his date with death by offering to become an organ donor, but the request was turned down because he didn't identify any family members who could benefit.

The condemned prisoner who was supposed to be the first person executed with the new cocktail, child killer Ronald Phillips, won an eight-month reprieve by asking to donate a kidney to his mother and his heart to his sister. The state is studying the feasibility of that.

McGuire was moved to Ohio's death house on Wednesday and was given a last meal of roast beef, toasted bagel with cream cheese and onion, butter pecan ice cream, fried chicken, potato salad, fried potatoes with onion and Coca-Cola, officials said.
He was was awake all night talking on the phone and writing letters and had emotional visits with his son and daughter and other family members. He declined breakfast and a shower on Thursday morning.

Before he died, McGuire thanked his victim's family for their "kind words," apparently in a letter they sent.
"I'm going to heaven, I'll see you there when you come," he said to his children.


I always have some discomfort with the death penalty, even if the crime was horrible, on the grounds that sometimes the wrong person was tried and convicted. Trials are not perfect. This man didn't deny his guilt, at least according to this report, and was apparently a believer in Christianity and reconciled to his death. The fact that the drugs took so long to be effective was unfortunate. Hopefully the authorities won't use that combination again.





Missing WSJ reporter's credit card used in Mexico: source – NBC
By Kerry Sanders and Tracy Connor, NBC News

An unexpected clue has emerged in the case of a Wall Street Journal energy reporter who went out for a walk five days ago and never returned: His credit card was used in Mexico on Wednesday night, a source close to his family told NBC News.

Hundreds of people have been searching for David Bird since he vanished in New Jersey on Saturday after he stepped out of his house without his cellphone or the medicine he takes twice daily for his liver transplant.

His family does not believe he simply wandered away and has suspected that his disappearance might be rooted in his work, which includes coverage of OPEC, a collection of oil-rich countries.

Long Hill, N.J., Police Lt. Ahmed Naga said police were trying to confirm the lead. He said the FBI was not yet involved in the investigation.

Naga said he was with a team that was using cameras to search under the ice on the Passaic River.

"It's a big, big activity," he said.
Bird, 55, was putting away Christmas decorations with his wife, Nancy, at their Long Hill Township home when he decided to take a stroll before a rainstorm, his wife told the Journal.

For more coverage on this story, go to NBC New York
When he had not returned in a couple of hours, even though it was raining heavily, his wife called police, who began searching the woods near the house.
"I knew this wasn't right. Something was wrong," the wife said. "He's a really great dad and a really great husband."

She said her husband, who was recovering from a stomach virus, could fall ill without the medication he has taken since a 2004 liver transplant.

Her husband, a father of two boys, is an experienced hiker and camper who ran the 2013 New York City Marathon. 

"This is so unlike him it's unbelievable to me," fellow Boy Scout leader Jim Caparoso told the newspaper. "If he was stuck somewhere, he knows how to shelter himself enough out of the elements. He knows how to signal if he can."
 

I can only expect that the FBI will now be called in. This has to be a murder or an abduction. His work covering the OPEC nations might well make him a likely victim. I'll collect any other stories I see about this.




Civilian deaths spark dispute between US-led forces, Afghan President Karzai – NBC
By Jamieson Lesko, Producer, NBC News

The death of at least two civilians on a Tuesday mission to clear Afghan insurgents has led to yet another dispute between U.S. led forces and the country’s president Hamid Karzai.

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) expressed regret Wednesday that two civilians were killed “during a deliberately-planned, Afghan-led clearing operation to disrupt insurgent activity” in Parwan Province, which is north of Kabul.  
Afghan Special Operations commandos and their coalition advisors came under heavy fire resulting in the death of one ISAF member they said, adding that they had called in defensive air support to suppress enemy fire.

Initial operational reports indicated that at least 10 insurgents died in the attack and that “tragically, two civilians inside a building from which insurgents were firing on the commandos were killed.”

Disputing the way events unfolded the Presidential Palace of Hamid Karzai described the incident as an “American airstrike” and condemned the attack. They added that their investigations found that eight civilians had died, including one woman and seven children.  

Contention over civilian casualties has been a long standing sticking point between the two nations and is one the reasons cited by Karzai for his refusal to sign a long-term bilateral security agreement between the U.S. and Afghanistan. 



It's impossible to tell which story is the correct one, or perhaps both have elements of truth to them. This raid was supposedly led by the Afghans with American assistance, and the air strike was to “suppress enemy fire.” I will feel easier when Karzai is out of office. He often seems like a hard-core enemy of the US. Of course, who will be elected in his place? The Taliban will almost certainly still be the controlling faction there.

I sometimes think the whole Middle East is a wasteland. Their policies about women, government and religion are set in stone, and they are, to me, living in the past. Of course, the US is interested in their oil and their central strategic location in the world, plus our protection of Israel. Our reasons for having our troops there are not entirely benign. Still, the 9/11 attack was what brought us in, and that was truly a brutal event. We had a right to protect ourselves. We could have stopped when we killed Bin Laden, though. How long do we need to fight in Afghanistan?




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An Old Tree Doesn't Get Taller, But Bulks Up Like A Bodybuilder -- NPR
by Richard Harris
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Like other animals and many living things, we humans grow when we're young and then stop growing once we mature. But trees, it turns out, are an exception to this general rule. In fact, scientists have discovered that trees grow faster the older they get.

Once trees reach a certain height, they do stop getting taller. So many foresters figured that tree growth — and girth — also slowed with age.
"What we found was the exact opposite," says Nate Stephenson, a forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, based in California's Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. "Tree growth rate increases continuously as trees get bigger and bigger," Stephenson says.

The General Sherman, a giant sequoia in California's Sequoia National Park, is more than 2,000 years old, and is thought to be the largest tree (by volume) in the world.

There have been hints before that mature trees grow faster than they age, but the idea had been controversial, he says. So he got together with 37 scientists from 16 nations to answer the question on a global scale.

They examined nearly 700,000 trees that have been the subject of long-term studies. Their conclusion, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature: While trees did stop getting taller, they continued to get wider — packing on more and more mass the older they got. And we're not talking about the tree-equivalent of an aging crowd with beer guts — old trees are more like active, healthy bodybuilders.

"It's as if, on your favorite sports team, you find out the star players are a bunch of 90-year-olds," Stephenson says. "They're the most active. They're the ones scoring the most points. That's an important thing to know."

Because, in the world of trees, that means the oldest members of the forest are doing the most to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and to store it as carbon in their wood. Stephenson says that's another argument for preserving old-growth forests.
"Not only do they hold a lot of carbon, but they're adding carbon at a tremendous rate," Stephenson says. "And that's going to be really important to understand when we're trying to predict how the forests are going to change in the future — in the face of a changing climate or other environmental changes."

Some ecologists have argued that young forests are more important than old forests for combating climate change, because the thousands of small trees that replace the few big ones do, collectively, pull more carbon dioxide out of the air than the mature forest does. But Stephenson says that doesn't give full credit to the importance of old trees.

And the results have implications that go beyond conservation strategies. The findings challenge an assumption that has seemingly applied to all of biology.
"We didn't think that things could have unlimited growth potential," says Nathan Phillips at Boston University. "There's been a long history of that kind of thinking."
But the new study shows that when it comes to growth in trees — well, the sky's the limit. And this leaves Phillips wondering whether trees might, in fact, have the potential to live forever. He tries to imagine how long a tree would live if you could prevent it from being blown down or succumbing to drought or disease.
"How long could it go? I think it could go for a long, long time — basically indefinitely," he says.

Phillips has seen 500-year-old Douglas fir trees that are still producing scads of pine cones, which means they're still reproducing. So when it comes to aging, trees have something very special going on.



For a number of ecological reasons, “old growth forests” have been sheltered from being cut down. This is just one more reason why they should be preserved. If we would just start planting trees on government owned land, or on other preservation lands, we could increase the amount of CO2 that is consumed out of the air that way, too. Instead we are watching large farmers cut trees in the South American rain forests, and doing nothing about it. Their national governments are just allowing it to happen and we aren't able to stop it. It's a tragedy. It's what happens when big money rules.




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Lawmakers Roll Out Voting Rights Act Fix – NPR
by Carrie Johnson
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A bipartisan group of lawmakers took the first step Thursday to patch a gaping hole in the 1965 Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court eviscerated a key part of the law that allowed for federal oversight of states with a history of ballot box discrimination.

The bill, known as the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014, has been sponsored in the House by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., and in the Senate by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Majority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Chris Coons, D-Del.

Their proposal includes several important provisions:

a trigger to bring states under federal pre-approval for election changes if those states have five or more voting rights violations over the past 15 years.
a way to allow courts to require federal oversight for states even if the Justice Department or private litigants can't demonstrate intentional discrimination at the ballot box.

a requirement for states to provide broad public notice of voting changes such as redistricting and moving of polling places so the public gets early warning of potential problems.

a statement that makes clear states can continue to pass photo ID laws that are "reasonable."

Six months after a divided Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to throw out the formula for covering states with a record of discrimination, a wide array of civil rights groups offered praise for any congressional effort to fix the situation. But many of those advocates expressed reservations too. Wade Henderson, president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, pointed out the proposal "does not go far enough in protecting language minorities or voters living in states with restrictive voter ID laws."

Penda Hair, co-director of the Advancement Project, said the new system for covering states with recent histories of discrimination apparently includes Georgia, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. But she added that new standard could leave out Alabama, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Florida.

"The exclusion of North Carolina is especially egregious, considering the flood of harmful voting policies from the state," Hair said. "These measures include a 2012 redistricting plan that diluted the power of African-American voters; the passage of a voter suppression law that cut early voting by a week, eliminated same-day registration, and requires strict voter ID, among many other restrictions; and last week's decision that residents of the 12th Congressional District will be forced to go 300 days without representation."

The Justice Department has sued Texas and North Carolina under a remaining part of the 1965 voting rights law, but Attorney General Eric Holder has said the government must meet a high bar in order to win those cases. The burden of proof — and the sometimes exorbitant litigation costs — now rests with the federal government, not the states under scrutiny.

Earlier this week, Stanford University law professor Pamela Karlan joined DOJ to work on voting rights issues, including a way forward after last year's Supreme Court defeat. And Debo Adegbile, the president's nominee to lead the Justice Department Civil Rights unit, had advised Leahy on the new bill as a member of his legislative staff.

The ACLU said it would seek improvements to a "problematic" part of the bill that appears to treat voter ID laws "somewhat less seriously from other voting rights violations." A congressional source suggested to NPR that resulted from a deliberate compromise to try to win Republican support for the plan.

Sensenbrenner, the sole Republican who appeared at the Capitol Hill news conference to debut the proposal, said voter ID laws would not be used "as a predicate for bail-in" of jurisdictions with a history of discrimination because he said those laws "are essential to protecting the integrity of our electoral process and when properly drafted do not have a discriminatory intent or effect."

"I will admit it is not a perfect bill," Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who spoke at the original March on Washington 50 years ago, said. "But it is a necessary and good beginning."

Lewis said it was fitting the legislation was being introduced just as the nation prepares to commemorate the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Leslie Proll, director of the Washington office of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., offered a more generous assessment of the new legislative proposal in an email to NPR. "Yes, it is not perfect, but we will work very hard to strengthen it," Proll said. "Congress has never let us down when it comes to the Voting Rights Act."

"We hope legislative leaders will give priority to this issue," said Gerald Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center. "The right to vote is the most important right we have as Americans."

Serious questions remain about the bill's chances on Capitol Hill — fueled by polarization in both chambers of Congress, a lack of GOP sponsors in the Senate, and the as-yet-unknown stance of House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.
The conversation on voting is far from over, though. A bipartisan voting commission led by Republican Ben Ginsberg and Democrat Robert Bauer is expected to release its recommendations for improving elections sometime later this month.


From the article above, Penda Hair, co-director of the Advancement Project, said “that new standard could leave out Alabama, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Florida. The exclusion of North Carolina is especially egregious, considering the flood of harmful voting policies from the state," Hair said.”

North Carolina is my home state, and I have often considered it to be more advanced culturally than some parts of the south, but they apparently are still fighting the Civil War. So is Florida, for that matter, though many northern people have moved down here for the climate. Those of us who are liberal and believe in full freedom for all will have to persist in trying to elect Democrats and stand up for civil rights issues as they arise. At any rate, Congress and the Senate have taken the initiative to craft this needed law. I hope it will solve the problems that come up.