Seized property: Judge orders sale of meth ring bookkeeper's lifestyle block
Seized property: Judge orders sale of meth ring bookkeeper’s lifestyle block
Sefton property featured on NZME OneRoof real estate website. Photo / oneroof.co.nz
A woman who kept books for tribal associates and helped them find hiding places for drugs and cash has lost her four-hectare lifestyle block as part of her sentence.
Connie Elizabeth Ross, 55, also known as Connie Smith, was jailed for two years and nine months in 2020 for her involvement in a methamphetamine…
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✔️ Work week done, Floss has had her bath, now it’s time for mummy’s #downtime 😂 It’s a been a week. We released three new #sustainablefashion ranges at thefashionadvocate.com and we’ve welcomed a new label, stay tuned. 🐶 Luna got desexed yesterday, I cried. She’s fine. 🐣 Floss moved out of her @bubnest and into a big girl cot this week. Yup, we’ve been #bedsharing for seven months. I think it’s been a bigger adjustment for me than her ha. 🌊 I built the website for @bigtriplittlefamily and we’ll be launching that soon, head over and follow our journey as we run our businesses from a #caravan tripping around the country. 👕 @misterbladin (my fiancés label) has just finished the final sample stage… three years in the making. Stay tuned. 🧘♀️ I meditated every day this week with the help of @talibrash. 🏃🏼♀️ I also exercised every day this week and threw a few @keepitcleaner workouts in the mix. So, I think I’ve well and truly earned this bath (and yes they are bath salt floaties not Floss poo) and this wine, albeit filled with #babytoys 😂 #thefashionadvocate #bathtime #mumsinbusiness #mumtime #metime #oneroof #womeninbusiness #mumlife #mindfulness (at Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) https://www.instagram.com/p/CaZRmkrvoy3/?utm_medium=tumblr
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In August 2007, around the time when construction started on Area 82, Dutch military intelligence in Oruzgan Province in central Afghanistan, followed in early 2008 by Germans in the northern cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz, and Danes in Helmand in the southwest, began using a new technology they had acquired through an NSA technology transfer program, an agency slide indicates.
The new technology simulated the radio receivers operated by mobile phone companies, tricking cellphones into connecting and then intercepting their communications. It was employed by devices commonly referred to as Stingrays, after one early brand, and dirtboxes, after the manufacturer Digital Receiver Technology Inc., which Boeing bought in 2008.
Ahead of European allies’ deployment to Afghanistan, they would have purchased and received training from the NSA in “specific Digital Receiver Technology (DRT) capabilities” in order to “exploit the communications they are expected to encounter,” as arranged for Spanish forces in 2005 and described by SIDtoday.
The DRT collection units were part of a bigger plan: to feed the newly constructed data center in Bagram with intercepted mobile phone communications from areas in Afghanistan where the NSA previously had little or no coverage.
Photographs included in the data flow document show the RT-RG data center at Area 82 during the final stages of construction, with trucks bringing reinforced steel beams into a hangar and an advanced cooling system in place for the servers.
The “gregarious” Norwegians started collecting cellphone communications using two DRT systems from two locations outside Kabul in February 2008. Sometime between April and June the same year, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain were scheduled to start feeding metadata intercepted from mobile phones by DRTs into RT-RG, according a document tracking the “dataflow status” of the project.
By July 2008, the Afghanistan Real Time Regional Gateway was operational and cellphone metadata from numerous sources poured into the system. RT-RG now had new features, such as notifications when “specified terms of interest,” presumably words or names flagged by analysts, were used during phone conversations, or when a targeted speaker was identified based on previous recordings. (For more on voice recognition, see this Intercept report and follow-up.)
Voice-monitoring capabilities were provided by a system called ONEROOF, which held audio intercepts. Together, ONEROOF and RT-RG enhanced “the warfighter’s ability to ‘find, fix, and finish’ the adversary,” that is, to locate, kill, or capture a human target, an NSA liaison to the military’s Central Command told SIDtoday.
So-called target development procedures that would normally require an analyst on the other side of the globe to query different databases and use a number of tools to manually enrich the intelligence were automatically available in RT-RG, provided it had enough data.
For example, instead of an analyst manually querying phone metadata for specific events that would help determine the likely “bed down” location where a target would sleep, RT-RG would automatically pre-calculate such locations for all entered targets. It would automatically look for people traveling with a target. And it would visualize the results of these traditionally time-consuming tasks with color-coded overlays on satellite images, so that military commanders could make quicker, and supposedly better, decisions in the theater.
RT-RG did not just make U.S. forces more lethal; it changed how they fought. A longtime NSA analyst put it this way in SIDtoday: Unlike in Vietnam, where the enemy mainly used Morse code over the radio, today’s enemy “is mainly using the mobile phone to communicate.” New technology “has allowed us to exploit a mobile communication for its content (‘find’) (..) and pinpoint its location (‘fix’) within a very small radius,” requiring “only a platoon-sized force (if that) … to action (‘finish’) the target.” A platoon normally includes roughly one dozen to four dozen soldiers.
In the words of the then commander of U.S. and allied Afghanistan forces, Gen. David Petraeus, quoted in a presentation prepared for a conference of technical minds from the NSA and its closest allies, “RTRG is the most significant [signals intelligence] support to the war fighter in the last decade.” But while RT-RG would reduce the number of troops needed on the ground, it coincided with an increased number of NSA staffers and soldier-spies deployed to war zones. As former NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett stated publicly, the NSA “deployed 5,000 NSA people to Iraq, and 8,000 to Afghanistan – and in total 18,000 to hostile areas around the world.”
At the same time, reliance on signals intelligence, or “SIGINT,” increased dramatically in the battlefield.
“Over 80% of combat operations in Afghanistan are driven by SIGINT or have SIGINT contribution,” former NSA Afghanistan representative Brian Goodman told SIDtoday in 2009. ”That is an indisputable fact. … Not a single combat operation goes on without SIGINT coverage.”
Two years later, in 2011, RT-RG “played a key role in 90 percent of all SIGINT developed operations,” according to the conference presentation. This translated to 2,270 capture/kill operations, 6,534 “enemies killed in action,” and 1,117 detainees. In comparison, the U.S. recorded 415 casualties in Afghanistan in 2011, while the U.K. and other nations recorded a total 148, according to iCasualties.org. (The presentation did not qualify the terms “enemy” or “killed in action,” or mention whether operations based on intelligence from RT-RG lead to the death or capture of the wrong people.)
As RT-RG became increasingly central to waging war in Afghanistan, the U.S. encouraged allies to put more data into it, upping their complicity in what would later be exposed as a deeply flawed infrastructure for killing and capturing those flagged as enemies.
The U.S. side of this system for killing people, often on the basis of phone monitoring, has been documented. One Intercept report described how U.S. drone strikes would hit the wrong people because targets had begun swapping identifying SIM cards out of their phones, aware of their adversary’s ability to track handsets. Another report, part of the Drone Papers, detailed how, during a five-month campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, “nearly nine out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets.” The Drone Papers also revealed how “military-aged males” killed in drone strikes would be labeled as enemies killed in action unless there was information indicating otherwise.
An example from a presentation about RT-RG’s ability to visualize intercepted data spatially. This “heat map” show a target’s call activity (blue means “fewer calls,” red means “more calls”). A text message sent by a target is automatically translated from Arabic and overlaid on Google Earth. This information helps a military commander “find, fix, and finish” the adversary.
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SURROUND YOURSELF WITH #GREATNESS AND #GREENERY. If there’s one thing I know in life, it’s that good vibes and good people are vital. To me, that means being around colour, surrounding myself with life-giving plants, and working alongside beautiful, supportive, passionate people. Since moving @thefashionadvocate’s #HQ to @oneroofwomen, I’ve flourished, and it’s a testament to the power of community. The word ‘community’ gets tossed around a lot in the co-working space, but very few #coworking offices I’ve been into have actually fostered it authentically. @oneroofwomen definitely has though, and this is also NOT a paid post - it’s an open, honest post about where I spend nearly 50 hours a week running @thefashionadvocate. One Roof is home to women-led businesses, and businesses #forpurpose, and for the first time in my business career, I feel like I fit in. The people around just get me, they understand what I’m trying to achieve, and one way or another, they’re all using their businesses as a #forceforgood. I work alongside Australia’s first female-founded superannuation fund @verve.super (which I’ve switched to since meeting, they’re ridiculously amazing), the incredible #bosslady duo at @y_impact_ (don’t let their post-less profile fool you, they’re amazing women doing amazing things for social enterprises), and a bunch of great women who get out of bed to make the world a better place. Every day I get to surround myself with women who are changing the world, women who have made it their career mission to change the gender pay gap, women (and a few men) who support struggling parents, and women who simply want to empower other women - not for the money, but because they love helping. It’s an amazing feeling walking into the @oneroofwomen office every day, and I’m proud to call it my business-home. #💕 #thefashionadvocate #oneroof #oneroofwomen #community #coworking #coworkersbelike #cowork #melbournecoworking #melbourne #womensupportingwomen #womenempoweringwomen #womenforwomen #coworkingmelbourne #thefutureisfemale #officegoals #plants #officedecor #melbourneoffice #business #businessblog #womeninbusinnes #startuplife #socialimpactbusiness (at One Roof Australia) https://www.instagram.com/p/By1CQteDSbo/?igshid=1pvx698aif4rl
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Basic Income — Musk Likes It, Who Else?
Basic Income — Musk Likes It, Who Else?
By Michael Barnard
Recently, Elon Musk was interviewed by CNBC and made an assertion that ran shivers up a few spines: “There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation.”
Basic Income — Musk Likes It, Who Else? was originally published on CleanTechnica.
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