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Sea Cucumber Found to Kill 95% of Cancer Cells, Shrink Tumors

Sea cucumber has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for hundreds of years, but they are relatively obscure in the U.S. This may be soon changing, however, as evidence mounts that sea cucumber extracts can kill cancer cells while stimulating the immune system.

As reported by Ethan Evers, author of “The Eden Prescription, previous research on sea cucumber has demonstrated its ability to kill lung, breast, prostate, skin, colon, pancreatic, and liver cancer cells. These extracts have also proven effective in killing leukemia and gioblastoma cells. Looks like we can add yet another food to the list of anti-cancer foods.

Scientists believe a key compound known as frondoside A to be responsible. Frondoside A is a triterpenoid, diverse organic compounds found in the essential oils and oleoresins of plants.

This latest study, published in PLoS One, has confirmed just how powerful frondoside A truly is. Researchers found it to kill 95% of ER+ breast cancer cells, 95% of liver cancer cells, 90% of melanoma cells, and 85-88% of three different types of lung cancer.

As Evers reports:

“But the benefits of this compound don’t just stop at directly inducing programmed cell death (apoptosis). It also inhibits angiogenesis (the ability of tumors to grow new blood vessels to get their food) and stops cancer metastasizing by impeding cell migration and invasion. Even more intriguing is the ability of frondoside A to activate our immune system’s natural killer cells to attack cancer cells. This has been shown for breast cancer in particular but may also apply to all cancers, because it involves the immune system and not cancer cells directly. This may partially explain why frondoside A was so effective at shrinking lung tumors in mice that it rivaled chemo drugs in performance.”

Read: Grapeseed Extract Better than Chemo at Halting Advanced Cancer

When given to mice with non-small cell lung cancer, frondoside A was found to shrink tumors by 40% in only 10 days. Traditional chemo drugs shrunk the tumors by 47 percent, but the risks of chemo treatment are far greater than any side-effects or risks of sea cucumber. (Namely because there are no known risks associated with sea cucumbers). In addition, the amount of frondoside A needed to achieve such results was miniscule—less than a single milligram for an adult weighing 165 pounds.

While sea cucumber extracts aren’t currently offered as a treatment for cancer—at least not in your traditional doctor’s office—you can find dried and powdered sea cucumber in health stores. It is packaged as a solution to arthritis and similar conditions because of its anti-inflammatory properties.

Source: naturalsociety.com

AT&T gets paid millions by the CIA to give up user data

The second-largest telecom country in the United States has been on the Central Intelligence Agency’s payroll to the tune of $10 million a year in exchange for voluntarily handing over troves of phone logs, the New York Times reported Thursday.

Citing federal officials with knowledge of the program, The Times’ Charlie Savage wrote that telecommunication giant AT&T has been routinely collaborating in CIA investigations by surrendering phone records to the agency and even scouring vast archives of dated logs on their behalf since at least 2010, adding yet another scandalous chapter in the sordid story of the telecom’s long-lasting and often elusive relationship with the government.

The exchange has not been codified into any official program or covered under a specific law, Savage said, but is rather done through a voluntary contract in which AT&T is awarded millions of dollars annually in exchange for searching its databases for the CIA in instances where the agency provides the phone number of an overseas terrorism suspect whose contacts are then called into question.

AT&T will scour these databases to search for information on foreign targets, Savage wrote, collecting in the process collateral intelligence about American persons who may have been in contact with the overseas suspect at any time in the past.

Representatives for both the CIA and AT&T declined to confirm the existence of the program to the Times, with the intelligence agency acknowledging that it is forbidden from “acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of US persons.” According to Savage, however, AT&T has indeed handed over information pertaining to American citizens, the likes of which are supposedly subject to privacy safeguards — that could then be bypassed by other US agencies.

“Most of the call logs provided by AT&T involve foreign-to-foreign calls, but when the company produces records of international calls with one end in the United States, it does not disclose the identity of the Americans and ‘masks’ several digits of their phone numbers,” Savage said officials told him.

At that point, he added, the CIA could contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation and ask for an administrative subpoena compelling AT&T to provide information about the American subject.

“The bureau handles any domestic investigation, but sometimes shares with the CIA the information about the American participant in those calls,” Savage again said his sources informed him.

Speaking on behalf of the CIA, spokesman Dean Boyd told the Times that the agency “protects the nation and upholds privacy rights of Americans by ensuring that its intelligence collection activities are focused on acquiring foreign intelligence and counterintelligence in accordance with US laws.”

“We value our customers’ privacy and work hard to protect it by ensuring compliance with the law in all respects. We do not comment on questions concerning national security,” AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel added.

Should Savage’s claim hold true, however, the conduct of the telephone company could fall directly counter to promises made on its website, particularly one sentence on a page that lists “Our privacy commitments.”

“We will not sell your personal information to anyone, for any purpose. Period,” AT&T assures its customers.

A caveat says that AT&T will indeed share personal information, however, to “Comply with court orders, subpoenas, lawful discovery requests and other legal or regulatory requirements, and to enforce our legal rights or defend against legal claims.” Another says information could be shared with “a responsible governmental entity in emergency or exigent circumstances or in situations involving immediate danger of death or serious physical injury.”

According to Savage’s sources, however, no court order is necessary for the sort of specific collaboration cited in the Times, and the exchange of millions of dollars annually suggests that the relationship is one that involves legitimate business transactions — with one party being the intelligence arm of the United States.

But as Savage and others were quick to point out, the CIA’s conduct in this case all too much emulates the behavior of another major intelligence community player: the National Security Agency. The NSA has maintained an alliance with AT&T that has been highly documented for years, raising additional questions about the immense scope — and cost — of the federal government’s efforts to infiltrate the telecom industry.

In 2007, former AT&T technician Mark Klein blew the whistle on a program that involved the NSA tapping all Internet data traveling into one of the company’s major California data hubs. Then just this year, intelligence contractor-turned-leaker Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was collecting millions of call records from multiple telecoms on a regular basis while also working hand-in-hand with certain Internet services to eavesdrop on online communications. According to one document released by Snowden, the NSA has paid those companies millions of dollars in order to cover the cost of maintaining that Internet surveillance program, code-named PRISM.

Elsewhere in their Privacy Policy, AT&T acknowledges, “We share your Personal Information with companies that perform services for us” and adds “we cannot guarantee that your Personal Information will never be disclosed in a manner inconsistent with this Policy.”

Source: RT

Ten Steps You Can Take Right Now Against Internet Surveillance

One of the trends we've seen is how, as the word of the NSA's spying has spread, more and more ordinary people want to know how (or if) they can defend themselves from surveillance online. But where to start?

The bad news is: if you're being personally targeted by a powerful intelligence agency like the NSA, it's very, very difficult to defend yourself. The good news, if you can call it that, is that much of what the NSA is doing is mass surveillance on everybody. With a few small steps, you can make that kind of surveillance a lot more difficult and expensive, both against you individually, and more generally against everyone.

Here are ten steps you can take to make your own devices secure. This isn't a complete list, and it won't make you completely safe from spying. But every step you take will make you a little bit safer than average. And it will make your attackers, whether they're the NSA or a local criminal, have to work that much harder.

1. Use end-to-end encryption. We know the NSA has been working to undermine encryption, but experts like Bruce Schneier who have seen the NSA documents feel that encryption is still "your friend". And your best friends remain open source systems that don't share your secret key with others, are open to examination by security experts, and encrypt data all the way from one end of a conversation to the other: from your device to the person you're chatting with. The easiest tool that achieves this end-to-end encryption is off-the-record (OTR) messaging, which gives instant messaging clients end-to-end encryption capabilities (and you can use it over existing services, such as Google Hangout and Facebook chat). Install it on your own computers, and get your friends to install it too. When you've done that, look into PGP–it's tricky to use, but used well it'll stop your email from being an open book to snoopers. (OTR isn't the same as Google Chat's option to "Go off the record"; you'll need extra software to get end-to-end encryption.)
2. Encrypt as much communications as you can. Even if you can't do end-to-end, you can still encrypt a lot of your Internet traffic. If you use EFF's HTTPS Everywhere browser addon for Chrome or Firefox, you can maximise the amount of web data you protect by forcing websites to encrypt webpages whenever possible. Use a virtual private network (VPN) when you're on a network you don't trust, like a cybercafe.
3. Encrypt your hard drive. The latest version of Windows, Macs, iOS and Android all have ways to encrypt your local storage. Turn it on. Without it, anyone with a few minutes physical access to your computer, tablet or smartphone can copy its contents, even if they don't have your password.
4. Strong passwords, kept safe. Passwords these days have to be ridiculously long to be safe against crackers. That includes the password to email accounts, and passwords to unlock devices, and passwords to web services. If it's bad to re-use passwords, and bad to use short passwords, how can you remember them all? Use a password manager. Even write down your passwords and keeping them in your wallet is safer than re-using the same short memorable password -- at least you'll know when your wallet is stolen. You can create a memorable strong master password using a random word system like that described at diceware.com.
5. Use Tor. "Tor Stinks", this slide leaked from GCHQ says. That shows much the intelligence services are worried about it. Tor is an the open source program that protects your anonymity online by shuffling your data through a global network of volunteer servers. If you install and use Tor, you can hide your origins from corporate and mass surveillance. You'll also be showing that Tor is used by everyone, not just the "terrorists" that GCHQ claims.
6. Turn on two-factor (or two-step) authentication. Google and Gmail has it; Twitter has it; Dropbox has it. Two factor authentication, where you type a password and a regularly changed confirmation number, helps protect you from attacks on web and cloud services. When available, turn it on for the services you use. If it's not available, tell the company you want it.
7. Don't click on attachments. The easiest ways to get intrusive malware onto your computer is through your email, or through compromised websites. Browsers are getting better at protecting you from the worst of the web, but files sent by email or downloaded from the Net can still take complete control of your computer. Get your friends to send you information in text; when they send you a file, double-check it's really from them.
8. Keep software updated, and use anti-virus software. The NSA may be attempting to compromise Internet companies (and we're still waiting to see whether anti-virus companies deliberately ignore government malware), but on the balance, it's still better to have the companies trying to fix your software than have attackers be able to exploit old bugs.
9. Keep extra secret information extra secure. Think about the data you have, and take extra steps to encrypt and conceal your most private data. You can use TrueCrypt to separately encrypt a USB flash drive. You might even want to keep your most private data on a cheap netbook, kept offline and only used for the purposes of reading or editing documents.
10. Be an ally. If you understand and care enough to have read this far, we need your help. To really challenge the surveillance state, you need to teach others what you've learned, and explain to them why it's important. Install OTR, Tor and other software for worried colleagues, and teach your friends how to use them. Explain to them the impact of the NSA revelations. Ask them to sign up to Stop Watching Us and other campaigns against bulk spying. Run a Tor node, or hold a cryptoparty. They need to stop watching us; and we need to start making it much harder for them to get away with it.

Source: EFF

FOX News Airs GMO Truth

NSA Hacks Google, You Need To See The Bigger Picture

NSA hacks Google. How could it affect you? Emails? Online searches? Think bigger…

Recently it was leaked that the National Security Agency tapped into primary overseas communication links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world. According to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the agency has access to raw data from hundreds of millions of Internet users, and many of them are Americans.

This is not the first disclosure from Snowden about NSA operations. Snowden is currently living in Russia after being granted temporary asylum following his release of other top secret NSA documents, including those about another agency surveillance program called PRISM. As expected, the U.S. Government would like to have a word with Mr. Snowden about the theft and unauthorized disclosure of that top-secret information.

According to a Washington Post article, a top-secret accounting dated January 9th 2013 provides evidence that the NSA‘s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to government data warehouses in Fort Meade, MD. In the 30 days prior to the report being released, the report states NSA analysts had processed more than 180 million records. By tapping those pipelines, the agency has access to not only the metadata, which includes information telling who sent what message and when, but analysts also have access to all of the raw data including text, audio and video.

NSA “Google Cloud Exploitation” Presentation

The primary tool that the NSA uses to infiltrate the data links is called MUSCULAR. The program is operated jointly between the National Security Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). MUSCULAR allows the agencies to copy raw data flows across fiber-optic lines that carry information between the Google data centers.

It is important to note that this program is different than the previously disclosed PRISM program, which gathers user information from court orders. Instead, the MUSCULAR program targets tech companies and collects user data without their knowledge.

Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, said the following in response to the news that the National Security Agency had secretly broken into the main links connecting Google’s data centers:

We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide. We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform.

However, in the past we have heard stories about Google cooperating with the NSA in joint operations. Last summer VirtualThreat.com posted a story about the Department of Justice asking for a court order to keep the Google and NSA partnership a secret. However, in this case it seems the search giant had no prior knowledge of the NSA’s activity.

In response to the allegations that the NSA had broken into Google’s network the National Security Agency released the following statement:

NSA has multiple authorities that it uses to accomplish its mission, which is centered on defending the nation. The Washington Post’s assertion that we use Executive Order 12333 collection to get around the limitations imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and FAA 702 is not true. The assertion that we collect vast quantities of U.S. persons’ data from this type of collection is also not true. NSA applies Attorney General-approved processes to protect the privacy of U.S. persons – minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention, and dissemination. NSA is a foreign intelligence agency. And we’re focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.

On October 30th, at the Bloomberg Cyber Security Conference in Washington D.C., the head of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, said:

I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers…We go through a court order. We issue that court order to them through the FBI. And its not millions, its thousands of those that are done. And its almost all against terrorism and other things like that. It has nothing to do with U.S. persons.

The PRISM program allows the NSA to gather huge amounts of Internet communications by legally compelling U.S. tech companies, including Gooogle, to cooperate with officials and turn over all data that matches court approved search queries. That program, also disclosed by Edward Snowden, is authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. PRISM operations are overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the clear advantages for the NSA with regard to their decision to intercept communications using MUSCULAR and overseas access points. With less oversight and looser regulations the agency has the ability to collect data from tech giants like Google using “full take”, “bulk access” and “high volume” operations.

These large-scale collection operations would be illegal in the United States; however, they are taking place overseas. Here the NSA can assume that anyone with information traversing these links must in fact be a foreigner.

What Are The Implications of a Program Like MUSCULAR?

Many people are saying to themselves “Sure, but how does this affect me?” Most people only think about Google being used for online searches and email. But did you know Google also has privately branded services that are being used by corporations, non-profit organizations and educational institutions?

For example, my own daughter uses Gmail and Google Drive for her school projects. Her school has assigned every student with a Google email address and a login for the school’s Google Drive account. Google Drive is a service where classroom documents are often stored.

In addition, a company that I worked for in the past used “Google Apps for Business” in order to provide email accounts, chat/voice/video conferencing, document storage and calendaring for its employees. By tapping primary Google data center links, the government potentially has access to all types of information.

Google has many service offerings that provide everything from Internet searches and email to video conferencing and private data storage. Did you know Google recently bought Motorola Mobility and is now manufacturing mobile phones?

Google is also the creator of the Android software that runs on many mobile phones and Internet tablets. Millions of individuals and organizations around the world trust Google to store their data securely away from the prying eyes of hackers and others that would use that information for their own advantage.

To get an idea of how much private information might be traveling across those Google data center links, take a look at the following info-graphic. It only shows a portion of the products offered by Google, but you quickly gain a better understanding of how much data potentially flows across the Google wires.

Google Products…more than just simple email and online searches.

Still think the government only has access to your online search histories and email? One of the coolest/scariest things I’ve noticed recently is the facial recognition software being deployed by Google and other social networking sites like Facebook. Have you ever noticed when you upload photos of people to a site like Picaso or Facebook you are immediately prompted to tag the names of other people in the image?

Typically the software has already completed the hard work of identifying individuals for you, all you have to do is confirm the selections made by the underlying program.

Google has added the capability to instantly recognize people, places, objects and text in photographs both on the Internet and on your hard drive. Don’t believe me? Watch the following video and then test it for yourself at http://images.google.com.

When you perform your tests try using photos of celebrities, politicians, TV/radio hosts, musicians, local Realtors, and so on. Let me know your results in the comments below this article.



Considering the fact that Google indexes nearly every web page and photograph on the open Internet, try to imagine the vast amounts of identity information that must be traveling back and forth on some of those Google data center links. Combine that information with all of the additional data listed in the info-graphic shown earlier and you have a recipe for privacy abuse and identity theft.

Any person or agency with the keys to all of that raw data could easily build complete profiles on hundreds of millions of individual people, places, companies and organizations at will.

Remember, it all comes down to who’s holding the keys. This time it was the National Security Agency tapping into Google’s data. Next time maybe it will be a hacker group, terrorist organization, or foreign government. It really doesn’t matter who does it in the end.

What really matters is that we have evolved into a society where we voluntarily surrender this information, and our very right to privacy, to the likes of Google, the NSA and hackers from around the world.

Source: Activist Post

Facebook Tests Software to Track Your Cursor on Screen

Facebook Inc.FB -0.91% is testing technology that would greatly expand the scope of data that it collects about its users, the head of the company’s analytics group said Tuesday.

The social network may start collecting data on minute user interactions with its content, such as how long a user’s cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone, Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin said Tuesday during an interview.

Mr. Rudin said the captured information could be added to a data analytics warehouse that is available for use throughout the company for an endless range of purposes–from product development to more precise targeting of advertising.

Facebook collects two kinds of data, demographic and behavioral. The demographic data—such as where a user lives or went to school—documents a user’s life beyond the network. The behavioral data—such as one’s circle of Facebook friends, or “likes”—is captured in real time on the network itself. The ongoing tests would greatly expand the behavioral data that is collected, according to Mr. Rudin. The tests are ongoing and part of a broader technology testing program, but Facebook should know within months whether it makes sense to incorporate the new data collection into the business, he said

New types of data Facebook may collect include “did your cursor hover over that ad … and was the newsfeed in a viewable area,” Mr. Rudin said. “It is a never-ending phase. I can’t promise that it will roll out. We probably will know in a couple of months,” said Mr. Rudin, a Silicon Valley veteran who arrived at Facebook in April 2012 from Zynga Inc.ZNGA -0.03%, where he was vice president of analytics and platform technologies.

As the head of analytics, Mr. Rudin is preparing the company’s infrastructure for a massive increase in the volume of its data.

Facebook isn’t the first company to contemplate recording such activity. Shutterstock Inc.SSTK -1.27%, a marketplace for digital images, records literally everything that its users do on the site. Shutterstock uses the open-source Hadoop distributed file system to analyze data such as where visitors to the site place their cursors and how long they hover over an image before they make a purchase. “Today, we are looking at every move a user makes, in order to optimize the Shutterstock experience….All these new technologies can process that,” Shutterstock founder and CEO Jon Oringer told the Wall Street Journal in March.

Facebook also is a major user of Hadoop, an open-source framework that is used to store large amounts of data on clusters of inexpensive machines. Facebook designs its own hardware to store its massive data analytics warehouse, which has grown 4,000 times during the last four years to a current level of 300 petabytes. The company uses a modified version of Hadoop to manage its data, according to Mr. Rudin. There are additional software layers on top of Hadoop, which rank the value of data and make sure it is accessible.

The data in the analytics warehouse—which is separate from the company’s user data, the volume of which has not been disclosed—is used in the targeting of advertising. As the company captures more data, it can help marketers target their advertising more effectively—assuming, of course, that the data is accessible.

“Instead of a warehouse of data, you can end up with a junkyard of data,” said Mr. Rudin, who spoke to CIO Journal during a break at the Strata and Hadoop World Conference in New York. He said that he has led a project to index that data, essentially creating an internal search engine for the analytics warehouse.

Source: Wall Street Journal