Wikileaks has published five million emails from Stratfor, an intelligence company based in Texas that, looking at their practices, appears to be America’s very own privately run CIA. According to Wikileaks, their deals would also include the use of privileged information to make money in financial markets.

Stratfor’s clients are the US Government, other countries and military organizations, as well as private companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or Raytheon. They have a global network of spies in governments and media companies, including “secret deals with dozens of media organizations and journalists, from Reuters to the Kiev Post.” According to the emails, these spies get paid in Swiss bank accounts and pre-paid credit cards.

Wikileaks says that the emails also reveal the creation of a parallel organization called StratCap. Apparently, this organization would use Stratfor network of informants to make money in financial markets. Wikileaks claims that the emails show how then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman put StratCap in motion in 2009.

:: Via Gawker ::

This is a HUGE deal.   Why, you say?  Check this article from the Telegraph:

:::  hmmmm via The Telegraph :::

This might be a good time to wonder why it is that we’re invading Afghanistan over Bin-Laden and not Pakistan.  I’ve heard people suggest that Pakistani officials were hiding him intentionally because America was giving Pakistan so much money to find him.  I think that’s highly dubious but interesting.

Also:

Andrew Weissmann, general counsel for the FBI, has announced that his agency is switching off thousands of Global Positioning System-based tracking devices used for surveillance after a Supreme Court decision last month. Weissmann made the statement during a University of San Francisco School of Law symposium on communications privacy this past Friday. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Weissmann said the ruling in the US vs. Jones case, which broadly limited the use of warrantless GPS tracking devices, brought about a “sea change” at the Justice Department.

The ruling (PDF), issued on January 23, held that placing a GPS device on the underbody of a car constitutes a search and requires a valid warrant. In the case of Antoine Jones, law enforcement agents obtained a warrant to place a GPS tracker on a car registered to Jones based on evidence suggesting he was involved in drug trafficking. However, the warrant expired before agents actually installed the device, and the GPS tracker was eventually installed in a different jurisdiction from the one the warrant had even authorized. The Justice Department claimed Jones had no reasonable expectation of privacy because he was driving on public roads.

The Supreme Court disagreed. Its ruling led to the FBI immediately turning off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices already deployed, according to Weissmann. The Bureau is now developing new guidelines for the use of the devices.

:: via Ars ::

Two rulings this week helped to clarify the circumstances under which a defendant can be compelled to reveal the contents of an encrypted hard drive. On Wednesday, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals let stand a judge’sruling in a Colorado case that the defendant in a mortgage fraud case could be compelled to produce the contents of her encrypted laptop. But on Thursday, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a Florida contempt of court charge against a suspect in a child pornography case who refused to decrypt the encrypted contents of several hard drives.

While the two rulings reach opposite results, they don’t necessarily contradict each other. The results turned on how much the government knew about the contents of the encrypted drives. In previous cases, the courts have held that when the government already knows of the existence of specific incriminating files, compelling a suspect to produce them does not violate the Fifth Amendment’s rule against self-incrimination. On the other hand, if the government merely suspects that an encrypted hard drive contains some incriminating documents, but lacks independent evidence for the existence of specific documents, then the owner of the hard drive is entitled to invoke the Fifth Amendment.

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal today to lay out his economic plan, reiterating his desire to cut the corporate tax rate in order to “restore America’s competitiveness.” During an interview on CNBC, billionaire investor Warren Buffett, in response to Santorum’s piece, noted that is is actually “a myth” that America’s corporate taxes are high. “Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness,” Buffett explained, even bringing a chart to prove his point:

The interesting thing about the corporate rate is that corporate profits, as a percentage of GDP last year were the highest or just about the highest in the last 50 years. They were ten and a fraction percent of GDP. That’s higher than we’ve seen in 50 years. The corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP were 1.2 percent, $180 billion. That’s just about the lowest we’ve seen. So our corporate tax rate last year, effectively, in terms of taxes paid for the United States, was around 12 percent, which is well below those existing in most of the industrialized countries around the world. So it is a myth that American corporations are paying 35 percent or anything like it…Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness.

::: Ohhhh Snap!! via TPM :::