Want To Defend Your Privacy? Here are Some Suggestions.

"...whenever technology gets too intrusive, the free market nearly always reacts with some kind of solution. And that's the case here. As the surveillers extended their reach, enterprising liberty lovers immediately began developing countermeasures."
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Want to Defend Your Privacy?

The Technology Investor

By Doug Hornig

Happy Independence Day to our American readers, wherever they might be.

While you're enjoying friends, family, and that charbroiled steak, perhaps this is also a good time to take stock of your own state of independence. To ponder your privacy, or lack thereof, and what you might do about it.

For the record, the word "privacy" doesn't appear in the Declaration of Independence, nor anywhere in the Constitution. It's difficult at this late date to divine whether the authors of those documents had any real notion of the term or thought it worth protecting. Nevertheless, we can draw some inferences from what they did write.

The Fourth Amendment declares that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but on probable cause." The Fifth Amendment adds that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."

An overarching right to be left alone certainly seems implied.
 
But what about personal electronic communications—a concept that could hardly have existed in the 18^th century. Should they also be secure? That's the question before us as a society. It's been a big one for a long time now, even though it only makes the front pages when an Edward Snowden type appears.
 
Snowden might be the current flavor of the day, but many of his revelations are little more than yesterday's news. For example, investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald, in his book 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, revealed how the NSA's questionable mass surveillance program—what he calls "the most dramatic expansion of NSA's power and authority in the agency's 49-year history"—was devised just days after 9/11, as an end run around the traditional requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Formerly, FISA demanded that an individual warrant be obtained if the government wanted to monitor Americans communicating overseas. But the Baby Bush administration unilaterally swept that aside. The new presidential directive granted the NSA the power to gather unlimited numbers of emails and phone calls into a database for analysis, all without the approval of Congress or any court. (Not to put everything on Dubya—Obama has essentially doubled down on this encroachment.)

Moving the surveillance totally onshore was a breeze from there. Connections between a suspect email address abroad and anyone else—accounts that either sent or received messages, whether in the United States or not—would be subject to examination. At that point, a more detailed list could be constructed, ensnaring any email addresses contacted by the suspect, and then any addresses contacted by those addresses, and so on without end.

More specifics came from whistleblower William Binney, a 30-year veteran of the NSA. Binney, who resigned from the agency in 2012 because of the dubious nature of its activities, volunteered the first public description of NSA's massive domestic spying program, called Stellar Wind, which intercepts domestic communications without protections for US citizens. Binney revealed that NSA has been given access to telecommunications companies' domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted between 15 and 20 trillion communications. He further disclosed that Stellar Wind was filed under the patriotic-sounding "Terrorist Surveillance Program" in order to give cover to its Constitutionally questionable nature.

We also can't pretend to be shocked just because we now know PRISM's name. The government has long employed techniques which they hide behind euphemisms like "full pipe monitoring," "sentiment analysis," and "association mapping." These involve concurrent surveillance of both email and social media, in order to build a detailed map of how evolving movements are organized. Political protests receive extremely close scrutiny, with information about them shared among federal, state, and local law enforcement officials. This is what happened with the "Occupy" demonstrations, where everything participants did was watched, every communication was recorded, and all of it was filed away for future reference. Everyone involved is now the subject of a government dossier.

Even if you're not part of a political movement, heaven help you if get caught up in some vast fishing expedition that hooks everyone who has ever visited some "suspicious" website, or even merely typed in some alarm-bell keywords.
 
Nor has the value of this kind of information gathering been lost on politicians. In fact, the presidential race of 2012 will likely go down as the first one in history—and it won't be the last—that was decided by who had the better Internet sniffers. Both the Romney and Obama campaigns continuously stalked voters across the Web, by installing cookies on their computers and observing the websites they visited as a means of nailing down their personal views. CampaignGrid, a Republican-affiliated firm, and Precision Network, working for the Democrats, jointly collected data on 150 million American Internet users. That's a full 80% of the entire registered voting population, for those keeping score.

Cellphones are another rich source of user data, especially when it comes to apps. If you download one, you grant to the vendor the right to gather all sorts of personal information. But then, you knew that when you read the "Permissions" document—you did read it, right?—so at least you know you can opt out.

Forget about turning off your phone's location-tracking feature (which a mere 19% of us do, Pew says). Regardless of whether it's on or off, your wireless carrier knows (and keeps a record of) where your phone is at all times it's connected to the cell network. Carriers can be forced to surrender the information to law enforcement, not to mention that they've been rather less than forthcoming about what else they may be doing with this data.
 
Anyone who thinks the government's ultimate goal is not to intercept and archive our every digital message, oral or written—or that it doesn't have that capability—needs to be aware of what's happening in Bluffdale, Utah, AKA the middle of nowhere. There, NSA contractors (and only those with top secret clearances) are putting the finishing touches on a staggeringly huge decryption and data storage center. James Bamford, the country's leading civilian authority on the NSA, wrote in Wired of the facility's purpose, which is no less than: "to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks."
 
Bluffdale will cost upwards of $2 billion and occupy a million square feet of space. Included will be four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with state-of-the-art supercomputers. The ultimate goal, Bamford says, is to construct a "worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes of data." (A yottabyte is a septillion, or 10²⁴ bytes—it's so gigantic that no one has yet coined a colloquial term for the next higher order of magnitude.)

To gather up those yottabytes, the NSA has dotted the country with a network of buildings set up at key Internet junction points. According to William Binney, the wiretaps in these secret locations are powered by highly sophisticated software that conducts "deep packet inspection," which is the ability closely to examine traffic even as it streams through the Internet's backbone cables at 10 gigbytes per second.

Fortunately, the situation is impossible but not hopeless—because whenever technology gets too intrusive, the free market nearly always reacts with some kind of solution. And that's the case here. As the surveillers extended their reach, enterprising liberty lovers immediately began developing countermeasures.

Keep in mind, however, that the technologies outlined below can only lessen your shadow so much, catching a little less attention from the all-seeing eye of Sauron. No one solution provides perfect privacy, and when push comes to shove and a government official shows up with a warrant in hand, he or she will inevitably get access to anything needed.

The first area to consider addressing is the digital trail you leave when researching any topic that might be of concern to someone's prying eyes (or, for that matter, doing anything at all on the Internet which you don't want analyzed, packaged, and sold).
 
One option for dealing with this concern is Tor, which is free and open source. According to its website, the service was "originally developed … for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others."

Tor tackles the problem of traffic analysis head on:

"How does traffic analysis work? Internet data packets have two parts: a data payload and a header used for routing. The data payload is whatever is being sent, whether that's an email message, a web page, or an audio file. Even if you encrypt the data payload of your communications, traffic analysis still reveals a great deal about what you're doing and, possibly, what you're saying. That's because it focuses on the header, which discloses source, destination, size, timing, and so on…

"Some attackers spy on multiple parts of the Internet and use sophisticated statistical techniques to track the communications patterns of many different organizations and individuals. Encryption does not help against these attackers, since it only hides the content of Internet traffic, not the headers."

To combat this, Tor has created a distributed network of users called a VPN (virtual private network). All data packets on that network "take a random pathway through several relays that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it's going."

One of the beauties of Tor is that it's packaged all up in single download. Just install the Tor browser—a privacy-tuned clone of the popular open-source Firefox browser—and it automatically manages all the networking for you. Surf in relative privacy with just a few clicks.

For more advanced users, there are options to route all kinds of activities through the network other than web browsing, such as Skype calls and file sharing.

Tor also offers Orbot, an Android application that allows mobile phone users to access the Web, instant messaging, and email without being monitored or blocked by a mobile ISP. It won't get you around those pesky data limits, but it will certainly reduce the amount of data your ISP can provide about you. If you find yourself in a region where access to certain services is restricted, it will open those options back up to you.

Cryptohippie is another site that utilizes the privacy capabilities of a VPN. According to the company, its subscription-based Road Warrior product "creates a strongly encrypted connection from your computer to the Cryptohippie anonymity network. From there, your traffic passes through at least two national jurisdictions, loses all association with your identifiers and emerges from our network at a distant location. But, even with all of this going on, you can surf, check your email, use Skype, and everything else exactly as you have been. Unless you reveal it yourself, no one can see who you are or what your data may be."

The service is well aware of the ever-present possibility of government interference with its operations. Thus Cryptohippie is truly international. Its only US presence is to authenticate connections to its servers in other countries. None of its servers are in the States.

(Of course, if you use Tor or Cryptohippie to log in to secured sites like Amazon or eBay, your activities at that end will still be logged to a database and associated with you, so don't delude yourself that such tools make you invisible. All they can do is keep your activity limited to the two parties involved—you and the computer or person on the other end—and keep outsiders from knowing that the conversation is taking place.)

These are highly sophisticated products. Perhaps you don't think you need that level of protection, but would just like to keep your browsing habits private. All of the major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome, have a "clear browsing history" button. They also have "enable private browsing" functions that you can activate.

How much value these options actually have is questionable, but in any event they're not going to stop Google from archiving your searches, if that's the engine you use. (And who doesn't?)

So if you don't want that, you can use a different search service, like DuckDuckGo, whose strict non-tracking policy is entertainingly presented in graphic form. Try it out in comparison to Google, and you'll find that the results are reasonably similar (although it seems odd at first not to have that strip of ads running down the right side of the screen). DuckDuckGo reports that it has seen a big increase in users since Snowden came forward.

Another area to consider addressing is your email. If you'd rather not have your email subject to daily inspection for "watchwords" our guardians consider inflammatory, one option is to use a foreign provider that will be less inclined to comply when Washington comes knocking with a "request" for user data. There are countless providers to choose from, including:

• Swissmail.org, which is obviously domiciled in Switzerland;
• Neomailbox.com, located in the Netherlands;
• CounterMail.com in Sweden;
• TrilightZone.org in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, and Malaysia; and
• Anonymousspeech.com, which boasts over 600,000 subscribers and is unusual in that it has no central location. "Our servers," the company says, "are constantly moving in different countries (Malaysia, Japan, Panama, etc.) and are always outside the US and Europe."

Whichever provider you choose, just be sure they offer at least an SSL connection to its services at all times. That will stop someone from downloading your email right off the wire. Features like encrypted storage and domicile in a state known for protecting privacy are also nice features.

The latest entrant in the privacy space is Silent Circle, a company whose story is worth detailing, because it has placed itself squarely in the forefront of the clash between alleged governmental need-to-know and personal privacy rights.

Silent Circle's CEO is Mike Janke, a former Navy SEAL commando and international security contractor who has gathered around him a megastar cast of techies, including most prominently, the legendary Phil Zimmermann, godfather of private data encryption and creator of the original PGP, which remains the world's most-utilized security system. Also on board are Jon Callas, the man behind Apple's whole-disk encryption, which is used to secure hard drives in Macs across the world; and Vincent Moscaritolo, a top cryptographic engineer who previously worked on PGP and for Apple.

The team hit the ground running last October with the introduction of its first product, an easy-to-use, surveillance-resistant communications platform that could be employed on an iPhone or iPad to encrypt mobile communications—text messages plus voice and video calls.

In order to avoid potential sanctions from Uncle Sam, Silent Circle was incorporated offshore, with an initial network build-out in Canada; it has plans to expand to Switzerland and Hong Kong.

Silent Circle immediately attracted attention from news organizations, nine of which signed on to protect their journalists' and sources' safety in delicate situations. A major multinational corporation ordered some 18,000 subscriptions for its staff. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies in nine countries have expressed interest in using the company to protect the communications of their own employees.
 
As Ryan Gallagher wrote in Slate:

"The technology uses a sophisticated peer-to-peer encryption technique that allows users to send encrypted files of up to 60 megabytes through a 'Silent Text' app. The sender of the file can set it on a timer so that it will automatically 'burn'—deleting it from both devices after a set period of, say, seven minutes. Until now, sending encrypted documents has been frustratingly difficult for anyone who isn't a sophisticated technology user, requiring knowledge of how to use and install various kinds of specialist software. What Silent Circle has done is to remove these hurdles, essentially democratizing encryption. It's a game-changer that will almost certainly make life easier and safer for journalists, dissidents, diplomats, and companies trying to evade state surveillance or corporate espionage."

The burn feature is extraordinarily valuable. It can mean the difference between life and death for someone who uses a phone to film an atrocity in a danger zone and transmits it to a safe remote location. Seven minutes later, it disappears from the source, even if the phone is seized and its contents examined.

Additionally, Silent Circle "doesn't retain metadata (such as times and dates calls are made using Silent Circle), and IP server logs showing who is visiting the Silent Circle website are currently held for only seven days. The same privacy-by-design approach will be adopted to protect the security of users' encrypted files. When a user sends a picture or document, it will be encrypted, digitally 'shredded' into thousands of pieces, and temporarily stored in a 'Secure Cloud Broker' until it is transmitted to the recipient. Silent Circle ... has no way of accessing the encrypted files because the 'key' to open them is held on the users' devices and then deleted after it has been used to open the files."

The Silent Suite, a subscription to which costs US $20/month, covers the communications spectrum with four features:

Silent Phone works on iPhone, iPad, Android, Galaxy, and Nexus, and provides encrypted, P2P, HD mobile voice and video over 3G, 4G, Edge, and WiFi, "with almost no latency" and no possibility of anyone (including the company) listening or wiretapping. The cryptographic keys involved are destroyed at the end of the call.
 
Silent Text allows the user to send P2P encrypted material—business documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Pages, Keynote, PDFs, CAD drawings, etc.), any file, any movie, any picture, map locations, URLs, calendar invites—and then delete them with its "Burn Notice" feature.

Silent Eyes allows for encrypted HD video and voice transmission using a laptop or desktop device. It's compatible with all Windows operating systems.

Silent Mail encrypts email with PGP Universal. It will run on smartphones, tablets, and computers using existing mail programs such as Outlook and Mac Mail. Absolute privacy is ensured with a silentmail.com email address and 1 Gb of encrypted storage.

This is not intended as an endorsement of Silent Circle, although we heartily approve of what the company is trying to do, and the other above references by no means represent an exhaustive guide to securing your communications. But they will point you in the right direction and perhaps spur you to action. A basic search will turn up dozens more options. Carefully study what each offers, read reviews from sources you trust, determine the service best suited to your particular needs, then just sign up.

However, we all have to accept the cold, hard fact of the matter, which is that this cat-and-mouse game is likely to be with us for a very long time. Those who believe they have the right to spy on us will develop ever more sophisticated ways of doing it. Those who believe we have a Constitutional right to privacy will fight tooth and nail to protect it.

It's possible that the one side eventually will develop an unstoppable offense or that the other will come up with a defense that can't be breached. But that's not the way to bet.

In the end, technology is completely neutral. It will evolve with no regard to how it is used. Expect those cats and mice to continue chasing each other, around and around and around. And make do with the best that is available to you at any given time.

SOURCE: caseyresearch.com http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/want-to-defend-your-privacy+
 

Me n’ The Snake...In the Pickup...At 55 mph.

On a lighter note, here's a recounting of an adventure I had earlier this summer that I thought might be entertaining.

June 26, 2012
Newnan, Georgia

Late this morning Mr. Cecil called.  Mr. Cecil is the old timer shade tree mechanic, literally. He works mostly on lawn equipment, assisted by his very precocious bloodhound puppy who at 14 weeks still has yet to be named, under a big old Georgia pecan tree growing beside his house, on his old homeplace outside Luthersville, a small rural town about 20 miles south of my town of Newnan, Georgia. He wanted to let me know that he had finished replacing a bunch of parts on my aging riding lawnmower and that my vacation from summer lawn care duty was, alas, over. I had to pick up the mower.

After lunch I heaved a sigh and moseyed next door to Mike’s house to borrow his old pickup and trailer for mower transport duty.

Now, you must understand that we live in a community with a minimum lot size of an acre and a half and Mike lives on our shared lake. His property abuts about 75 acres of undeveloped wild woodland/wetland literally teeming with an abundance of southern woodland/wetland critters. His pickup, probably an eighty-something vintage small model Ford, lives tucked into a tight niche in the edge of the woodland/wetland forest on the edge of his property where multitudes of critters live and go about their lives almost totally unmolested by humankind. Heck, they probably live their entire lives without ever SEEING a human being. To put things in perspective, I guess they figure they OWN the damn place. The truck’s exterior is home to I’d say about 32 species of lichens, molds, mosses, mildews, and maybe even a few mushrooms, given the perfect habitat for molds and fungi that exists in its woodsy niche.

 

The Mossy Snake Truck in its natural habitat

Well, when I arrived to get the truck, I opened the driver’s door and fished around for the keys which Mike keeps in the glove box, since we have no crime in our neighborhood, we are somewhat loose regarding physical security; many of us never lock doors and keep keys to vehicles in more logical than secure places. The keys were, predictably, where they always stay and, after hooking up the trailer, I drove south through Newnan and sleepy little Moreland in the 95 degree summer heat with both windows rolled down for whatever cooling I could wring out of the automotive generated breeze in midday, summertime Georgia. I was wearing shorts, no socks, a pair of Crocs, and a t-shirt, summer uniform hereabouts.

As I accelerated out of Moreland on the two lane asphalt highway leading to Luthersville, I found myself behind a slower (?) Honda with a badly bent right rear wheel which was wobbling wildly and, no doubt shaking the fillings out of the driver’s teeth. I was unable to pass him since the Ford can only be pressed so hard before her engine begins to balk by refusing to make more power as she spits and vibrates in protest with the application of what she deems to be excessive throttle. She will only accelerate after the driver eases up on the throttle, and then only reluctantly. 55 mph is about the maximum velocity one can coax from the old girl when a trailer is attached. I had nudged her up to that limit when I happened to feel something gently rub across my bare right calf. Naturally, I looked down and saw what I, at first, took to be a slender 3' long black strap waving at me just over the edge of the bench seat. After about a nanosecond my age-deteriorated cerebral function finally calculated that cloth straps are NOT, as a general rule, tapered to a point. After calculating frantically for a second nanosecond my brain screamed at the top of its voice: SNAKE!! IN TRUCK!! WITH YOU!!

 

 

Southern Black Racer

(click image to see him - NOT NEARLY as big as I did)

I instantly, and totally, forgot that I was anywhere near, much less driving, a somewhat unstable truck/trailer rig hurtling along the highway at about 55 mph, with the trailer hitched behind and just waiting for me to saw the wheel so it could jack knife the whole ensemble into the woods off the side of the highway. I HAD to stay cool as the proverbial “center seed in a summer Georgia cucumber.” My brain was wildly performing calculations on somewhat the scale of a Cray Supercomputer in order to somehow assure my survival. It DID fairly rapidly determine that the snake was non-poisonous, that’s GOOD; that its head was moving away from me into the passenger floorboard area – GOOD again. My only choice at this point was to get that damn rig stopped with the utmost dispatch and THEN deal with the black snake sharing the truck with me. One of us HAD to go, and I wasn’t of a mind for it to be me.

Now, while I generally LIKE snakes, I prefer a “live and let live” relationship. I NEVER have aspired to get close to, pet, or otherwise touch any snake and I was pretty well convinced he shared these feelings reciprocally. So I attended to first things first….I crammed on the brakes and steered the bucking rig onto the shoulder of the road with tires screaming in protest. Somehow I managed to keep the truck and trailer in line on the longitudinal plane until motion ceased and the snake and I were out of danger from a violent crash at relatively high speed into some rural Georgia swamp.

Next, somehow, despite being strapped firmly in my seat, I managed to dive over to the right side of the cab and wrench open the passenger door to provide as wide an avenue of escape as possible for my three foot long, no-shouldered friend. I even thought I might motivate him to utilize the door opening by sort of trying to herd him with the cardboard box containing the tie-down straps I’d brought to secure the mower for the return trip. No joy, he headed for what HE thought was safety in his slithery little world and made a serpentine break for the back (or front depending on your perspective) side of the instrument panel where he likely figured he could camouflage himself as, say, a bundle of windshield wiper wires, or something.

It was now or never as his head scuttled up behind the glove box in the right front corner of the red interior. I made a desperate dive and, for the first time in my life, wrapped all four of my fingers, thumb, and palm fully and firmly around the poor, terrified snake’s soft, tubular body about a foot from the tail. I simply could not allow him to take refuge in the dashboard wiring and just continue on my journey to Luthersville with a stowaway serpent. IT COULD NOT HAPPEN!!

I pulled with all my might but the squirming little rascal had managed to gain some firm purchase in the rat’s nest of wiring and support structure behind the dash and declined all my offers of freedom, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and sexual pleasures to be found in a new neighborhood. The little sucker just wouldn’t let go! So I pursued the only option I could think of…I managed to get hold of him with my other hand and, with two hands pulling as hard as I could, he finally decided, as had I, that either he let go and consign himself to his fate or be rent quite literally in twain with his halves terminally separated; one to rot on the roadside, and the other to rot behind Mikes dashboard. So, under grave protest he finally and very gradually relinquished his grip on the wiring and structure and was flung with all my might as far into the roadside stubble as I was able to launch him. The last time I saw him he was still flailing wildly in an attempt to defend his body from dismemberment (such as a snake can suffer, lacking members in the traditional sense) as I hastily slammed the door on this small drama of my life.

I opted not to stop at the country diner in Luthersville for a cup of coffee as my nerves were quite adequately stimulated, a condition that lasted the rest of the day.

"One Dark Night In Vietnam I Was On An Ambush Patrol..." - In A Medical Breakthrough Blind Mice Given Sight.

Joe Kirkup shares a harrowing personal incident from his Vietnam experience and a Bloomberg article about an extremely encouraging medical breakthrough

Lowflyer

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 One dark night in Vietnam I was on an ambush patrol approaching the small river that marked the Cambodian border. 

Unfortunately the enemy had set up their ambush first and we walked right into it.  The gunfire and the general chaos was punctuated by explosions from grenades and crude Viet Cong claymore devices which contained rusty nails, broken Coke bottles and human feces. 

One of these blasts tore a hole in my shoulder and covered my face with mud, foliage, tiny cuts and excrement.  For about twenty seconds, where there had been light from illumination rounds and the constant flicker of muzzle flashes, now there was only darkness. 

I thought I was blind. The bottomless pit of terror that opened up in my stomach is almost impossible to describe.

For me it was a fleeting experience, but for many, many others it is a daily reality.  Let's all make damned sure this research gets 100% of the funding it needs and give thanks that we live in a society that can make things like this happen.
  
  JK

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Blind Mice Given Sight After Device Cracks Retinal Code

By Jeanna Smialek - Aug 14, 2012 7:05 PM ET

SOURCE: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-13/blind-mice-given-sight-after-device-cracks-retinal-code.html

(Corrects the experimental process in seventh paragraph of story published yesterday.)

Blind mice had their vision restored with a device that helped diseased retinas send signals to the brain, according to a study that may lead to new prosthetic technology for millions of sight-impaired people.

Current devices are limited in the aid they provide to people with degenerative diseases of the retina, the part of the eye that converts light into electrical impulses to the brain. In research described today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists cracked the code the retina uses to communicate with the brain.

The technology moves prosthetics beyond bright light and high-contrast recognition and may be adopted for human use within a year or two, said Sheila Nirenberg, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and the study’s lead author.

“What this shows is that we have the essential ingredients to make a very effective prosthetic,” Nirenberg said. Researchers haven’t yet tested the approach on humans, though have assembled the code for monkeys, she said.

Once the researchers determined the code the mouse retina used to communicate with the brain, they were able to mimic it with electric-signal sending glasses, Nirenberg said. Previous prosthetics have used less-specific stimulation and proved inherently limited as a result, she said.

About 20 million people worldwide are blind or facing blindness due to retinal degenerative diseases, such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. The disorders cause a progressive loss of the retina’s input cells, or photoreceptors.

Visual Equations

Nirenberg and co-author Chethan Pandarinath first monitored healthy eyes to determine the set of equations that translate light received by the retina into something the brain can understand. Then, they used special glasses to create a similar code and deliver it to the eye, which had been engineered to contain light-sensitive proteins. The cells received the code through the light sensitive proteins and fired electric impulses, which the brain could interpret as images.

Nirenberg’s research “is basically giving vision back to a system that doesn’t work,” said Aude Oliva, a principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who wasn’t involved in the research.“I’ve never seen, and other people have never seen, this quality.”

No foreseeable barriers should stop the movement into humans now that the technology has been created, Oliva said. Nirenberg said that if researchers can come up with adequate cash to fund clinical trials, she hopes to soon adapt the technology.

Macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in people older than 55 in the western world and may triple in incidence by 2025 according to a 2009 report by the American Optometric Society. Retinal diseases could find a “reasonable solution” in the technology, said Jonathan Victor, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at Weill who was familiar with, but not involved in the research.

“It’s a major step, it’s elegant, and it works,” he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeanna Smialek in New York at jsmialek@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net

Cobrapilot82 posts another superb piece of military flight lore that touches the heart of everyone who ever has struggled through that steep learning curve called "Flight School:"

Swaggering to the Flight Line

by Walter McDonald

Out of cram sessions in the bar,
we practiced crashing after midnight,
emergency steps we drilled
until we could fly blindfolded
stumbling up stairs of the barracks.
We turned unnatural acts around
in our minds, spins and loops

we would have to do perfect,
alone. Out of bachelor bunks,
out of accident reports and training films,
we swaggered to the flight line,
living on flames in the belly of jets,
five thousand pounds of thrust.
Wings and three good friends

sustained us, men we would die for,
table mates straining to take
the IP's brain and luck
and make them ours, aping his stride,
the cock of his flight cap. No coach
ever drove us like that brash
instructor pilot, almost a god,

a man with wings and battle ribbons
and touch on controls we coveted.
One by one he launched us solo
in December skies he owned, cold wind
whipping the ramp when I strapped in
and taxied out without his breath
in my headset—exciting silence,

nothing but these two fists to save me,
the runway thudding faster and faster
and falling away, the moon floating up
from Savannah, the force in my hand massive,
banking with blazing power out of traffic,
climbing through baffling darkness
into the splendor of stars.

"Swaggering to the Flight Line" by Walt McDonald, from All Occasions. © University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. Reprinted with permission

John Steinbeck on Helicopter Pilots

Cobrapilot82 contributed this bit of lore from the Vietnam War:

Only a handful of people have won both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes in literature. One of them was iconic American novelist John Steinbeck. His incredible body of work stretched from Tortilla Flat to Of Mice and Men, from Grapes of Wrath to Cannery Row to East Of Eden.  He had a gift for the language that few before or since have possessed.

 Not widely known is the fact that in 1966-67, a year before his death, he went to Vietnam at the request of his friend Harry F. Guggenheim, publisher of Newsday to do a series of reports on the war. The reports took the form of letters to his dear friend Alicia Patterson, Newsday's first editor and publisher.  Those letters have been published in a book by Thomas E. Barden, Vietnam veteran and professor of English at the University of Toledo. The book is entitled, “Steinbeck on Vietnam: Dispatches From The War.”

 I found the following passages relevant to our experience in Vietnam and his ability to weave a vision is just magical. On January 7, 1967, Steinbeck was in Pleiku, flying with Shamrock Flight, D Troop, 10th Cavalry:

“...We are to move to the Huey of Major James Patrick Thomas of whom it is said that he has changed the classic sophist's question to how many choppers could Thomas sit on the point of a pin.

 Alicia, I wish I could tell you about these pilots. They make me sick with envy. They ride their vehicles the way a man controls a fine, well-trained quarter horse. They weave along stream beds, rise like swallows to clear trees, they turn and twist and dip like swifts in the evening. I watch their hands and feet on the controls, the delicacy of the coordination reminds me of the sure and seeming slow hands of (Pablo) Casals on the cello. They are truly musicians hands and they play their controls like music and they dance them like ballerinas and they make me jealous because I want so much to do it. Remember your child night dream of perfect flight free and wonderful? It's like that, and sadly I know I never can.

My hands are too old and forgetful to take orders from the command center, which speaks of updrafts and side winds, of drift and shift, or ground fire indicated by a tiny puff or flash, or a hit and all these commands must be obeyed by the musicians hands instantly and automatically. I must take my longing out in admiration and the joy of seeing it.

Sorry about that leak of ecstasy, Alicia, but I had to get it out or burst.”

The man just had a way with words, no?

An Independence Day Post For My Fellow Vietnam Helicopter Pilots and Crewmembers - My Heroes, One And All

There was never one second during my tour in Vietnam that I doubted that any of you would have my back. Thank You and God Bless you all.

Crocodile 1 (1967)

119th Assault Helicopter Company

Pleiku RVN

Ever Dream of Flying "Freer" Than A Bird?

This video will certainly give you a sense of flying that is just not there in most videos I've seen. My impression was one of being "freer than a bird." I think you will agree.

Let's go flying like we never did before!

New Home Defense Dawg

Due to a rise of crime in the neighborhood,  I just adopted a retired military dog to protect my house.

With the recent military cuts overseas, the US government has developed a new program where citizens can apply to adopt retired military canines.  The nice part is he is a year old and already fully trained by the US Navy SEALs.

I’ve attached some photos of him below...

For your safety, UPON ARRIVING AT MY HOME please call me from the driveway and

REMAIN IN YOUR CAR!!!

Being Eaten...

How do you eat a fish that must be swallowed headfirst if you have impaled it from the side with your beak?? Watch.

CLICK HERE: Florida Anhinga eating a fish

My friend, Joe Kirkup is an accomplished photographer and he sent this animated photo sequence that he took on one of his frequent photographic safaris into the darkest Everglades of Florida.

U.S. G.I. Baby Killer dies saving Afghan girl

Joe Kirkup reports this item:

Just in case you missed this on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
    JK

U.S. soldier dies saving Afghan girl

By Larry Shaughnessy
After the news of a U.S. soldier charged with murdering Afghan civilians, mostly women and children, the story of Spc. Dennis Weichel of the Rhode Island National Guard bears telling.

The official Pentagon news release says he died "from injuries suffered in a noncombat related incident." But there is much more to the story. Weichel, 29, of Providence, died saving the life of a little girl.

According to the Rhode Island National Guard and the U.S. Army, Weichel was in a convoy a week ago with his unit in Laghman Province, in northeast Afghanistan. Some children were in the road in front of the convoy, and Weichel and other troops got out to move them out of the way.

Most of the children moved, but one little girl went back to pick up some brass shell casings in the road. Afghan civilians often recycle the casings, and the girl appeared to aim to do that. But a Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle was moving toward her, according to Lt. Col. Denis Riel of the Rhode Island National Guard.

MRAPs, as they are known, usually weigh more than 16 tons.

Weichel saw the massive truck bearing down on the girl and grabbed her out of the way. But in the process, the armored truck ran him over, Riel said.

The little girl is fine. Weichel died a short time later of his injuries.

"He was a big kid at heart. He always had a smile on his face, and he made everyone laugh," 1st Sgt. Nicky Peppe, who served with Weichel in Iraq, is quoted as saying in an Army story.

"But as much as Weichel was funny, he was also a professional. When it was time to go outside the wire for a combat patrol, he was all business."

Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee has ordered flags in the state lowered to half-staff until Weichel, who was posthumously promoted to sergeant, is laid to rest Monday.

Weichel is survived by his parents, his fiancee and three children. His family will be awarded a Bronze Star and other awards for his sacrifice.