Banks Reopen in Cyprus Under Tight Armed Security

Bank tellers urged customers not to take out their frustrations when the doors swung open at noon (local time) on Thursday for the first time in 12 days, while authorities trucked in shipping containers full of euros under heavy security.

World markets were jittery over the crisis, which has seen capital controls imposed for the first time by a eurozone economy in order to prevent financial meltdown after the 10-billion-euro EU-IMF rescue package.

Most banks in Nicosia had between one and three guards posted at their entrances early morning, some of them carrying weapons – an alien sight in the generally peaceful east Mediterranean tourist destination.

Banks opened unusually late to allow time to prepare for the new cash curbs and are set to stay open for six hours until 6pm (local time). Cypriot authorities appealed on television late Wednesday for people to give priority to the elderly as many did not have credit cards and had to withdraw their money over the counter.

FBI to monitor online chats in real-time by 2014

AFP Photo / Stan Honda

The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t have the ability to monitor everyone’s one-on-one Internet chats in real-time just yet, but the agency’s chief lawyer says all that should soon change.

FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman discussed the Justice Department’s power to put pressure on cyber-criminals during an address last week at the National Press Club in Washington, and during the engagement he opened up about what exactly the country’s top domestic police patrol wants in their bag of tricks: By the years’ end, the attorney says the FBI hopes to be able to snoop on conversations that occur over the Web by gaining access to up-to-the-second feeds of seemingly secretive chats.

Currently telecommunications within the United States can be bugged with a court’s approval thanks to 1994’s Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Weissman, however, warns that as technology advances, agencies like the FBI become increasingly out of luck in terms of tracking down criminals who’ve moved operations off the streets and onto the Web.

“The problem is where we are today. The way we communicate is really not limited to telephone nowadays and sort of the old fashioned picking up the phone and calling someone,” Weismann said.

Online services such as Gmail, Google Voice and DropBox dominate our online lives, Weissman said, but legislation does not yet exist that lets law enforcement tap into Internet accounts with the cyber-equivalent of snooping in on a phone call. While the FBI may obtain court orders to collect archived Internet conversations from the administrators of email services such as Gmail, Weissman said that won’t do. The ability to actually intercepting online chats is something the FBI wants to have, and Weissman said they are working on having it ready by the end of the year.

“You do have laws that say you need to keep things for a certain amount of time, but in the cyber realm you can have companies that keep things for five minutes,” he said. “You can imagine totally legitimate reasons for that, but you can also imagine how enticing that ability is for people who are up to no good because the evidence comes and it goes.”

Weissman said that legislation in other countries allow law enforcement there to intercept real time dialogs. With such an option overseas, tracking so-called cyberterrorists is as easy as eavesdropping on a phone cool.

“We don’t have the ability to go to court and say we need a court order that actually requires the recipient of that order to effectuate the intercept. Other countries have that and I think most people who are not lawyers sort of assume that’s what you’re getting when you go to court,” he said. “You think that you’re getting an order that says, ‘Recipient, you have to actually effectuate the communication.’ Well that’s not what you get. You get something that says that you have to provide technical assistance.”

“The problem with not having [that ability in America] is that we’re making the ability to intercept communications with a court order increasingly obsolete,” Weissman added. “Those communications are being used for criminal conversations, by definition…and so this huge legal apparatus that many of you know about to prevent crimes, to prevent terrorist attacks is becoming increasingly hampered and increasingly marginalized the more we have technology that is not covered by CALEA. Because we don’t have the ability to just go to the court and say ‘You know what, they just have to do it.’”

Weissman added that the ability to obtain a court order that can track Internet chats in real-time “is a huge priority for the FBI” that, although in the works, was halted by last year’s presidential election. Now with the 2012 race out of the picture — and the country’s most transparent president ever elected for another round — the FBI aims to iron out a deal that will let Internet companies like Google tap into their data to watch what’s happening on the Web in instances where waiting five minutes just won’t do. Weissman even hinted at being able to intercept messages sent over entirely different sites, such as a game of Scrabble conducted over Facebook.

Meanwhile, that archived information is still as sought after as ever before. Google’s admitted in the back in January that government requests for user data skyrocketed by 25 percent in the last year, with the US leading the field by far in calls for data disclosure. When Google released statistics only a few weeks earlier showing the first six months of requests, the trend was already something that was hard to ignore.

“This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise,” Google acknowledges in a blog post published Tuesday, November 13.

Source: RT

Hippie Commune Thrives as Europe Tires of Chaos

As Europe's financial woes deepen and depositors increasingly question the safety of their savings, some European citizens are looking to escape their economic troubles by joining an Italian commune, replete with its own monetary, political and economic system.

Located in Piedmont in north-western Italy, the "Damanhur" commune calls itself an "eco-society," operating with the help of its own social and political structure and money, the Credito. Since the financial crisis, the community says that there has been a "significant increase" in ordinary people asking to visit or join its community, whose economic system is based on "a mix of free enterprise, solidarity, communal sharing and co-operative trade".

Damanur resident Macaco Tamerice (Macaco means "Monkey" in Italian - all residents of Damanhur take on an animal name) told CNBC that Damanhur is attracting many Europeans tired of economic crisis as an interest in "alternative social models" grows.

"In the last few years there has been an increase in interest in Damanhur and the hits on our website and participation in our Facebook page and blog have increased significantly," Tamerice said.

"This is why we have developed a program called the 'New Life Citizenship' which allows people to apply to come and live in Damanhur for three months, inside its communities as a citizen....After this period people can decide to become a citizen of Damanhur or use the new experience to be spread somewhere else," Tamerice told CNBC.

The commune has had over 3,000 requests for information regarding temporary residence since it started its citizenship course, during which visitors live in the commune and attend its "university" courses ranging from art and ecology to holistic wellbeing, "astral travel" and "past lives research". Those that either stay or leave often pass on the ethos of Damanhur, which has regional centers, called "embassies," in capital cities across Europe, America and Japan.

Though it could be dismissed as another New Age hippie refuge or throwback to the free-loving 1960s, Damanhur is a commune with a mission to create a new model society in Europe, a region it sees as desperately in need of a new type of economic and societal model.

(Read More: Depression, Suicides Rise as Euro Debt Crisis Intensifies )

Damanhur says its economy offers the "best of two opposing economic doctrines: liberalism and socialism" - an economic system it has developed since its founding in 1975. The community states that its economic system "blends free enterprise with solidarity and communal sharing, with the objective of creating the most advantages and wealth possible at an individual and collective level."

In light of the current banking deposit levy being imposed in Cyprus in return for a bailout from international lenders, the Damanhur community is keen to highlight the independence of its citizens' employment activities and stresses that all its citizens manage their own money.

Though not all of its 1,000 multinational residents work in the community's "co-operative" economic system, there are 60 businesses in the community across a number of sectors, from artistic workshops and computer and IT consultancies to publishing and eco-building, and these trade using the local currency- the "Credito" - which is minted in a normal Italian coin factory, Tamerice told CNBC.

"Inside Damanhur, you can buy and sell anything with the Credito. But we also have a convention with some shops and fuel stations in the area that people can buy products with Creditos. These businesses can then spend the Creditos in our shops and services, or exchange the Creditos into euro," Tamerice said. The commune's website states that the Credit "is legally and fiscally regulated, and its value is equal to that of the euro (Exchange:EUR=)."

Italy has been in political limbo since inconclusive elections in February which saw the rise of radical, alternative political parties such as comedian Beppe Grillo's "Five Star Movement." On Thursday, the leader of the center-left coalition, Pier-Luigi Bersani- is expected to visit President Giorgio Napolitano with the news that he has acquired enough broader political support to form a government.

(Read More: Only an 'Insane Person' Would Want to Run Italy Now: Bersani )

In Damanhur, however, a democratic system with representatives and elected bodies has evolved over the last thirty years, based on the active participation of the community in debates and decision-making. " In Italy there is a huge crisis and as we live in Italy, Damanhur is also affected by the crisis. But our system is based on solidarity, and in this way living together and helping each other when needed, we can live well," Tamerice remarked.

Source: Yahoo Finance