Iran to kill Canadian web developer

Iran has decided that a Canadian man who visited the country a couple of years ago deserves to die for promoting porn.

Iran's supreme court has upheld the death sentence for a web programmer who faces imminent execution after being found guilty of developing and promoting porn websites.

Saeed Malekpour was visiting the country in October 2008 when he was picked up by plainclothes police and taken to Evin prison in Tehran, where he spent a year in solitary confinement without access to lawyers and without charge.

After a year, Malekpour was wheeled out in front of the television cameras, confessing to a series of "crimes" in connection with a porn website. On the basis of his TV confessions, he was convicted of designing and moderating adult materials online by a court in Tehran.

He later retracted his confessions in a letter sent from prison, in which he said they had "extracted under pressure, physical and psychological torture" and in the face of threats to him and his family.

Malekpour is a permanent resident of Canada. He wrote photo-uploading software which was used by a porn website without his knowledge.

After an international campaign and expert evidence, the supreme court suspended Malekpour's death sentence in June 2011 and ordered a judicial review

According to the Guardian, the view of the court was that it was all fair enough to execute a visitor to their country for something which is not a crime in the country they reside, and in any event they are probably innocent.

Drewery Dyke, of Amnesty International, said that it seems Iran believes its law can be extended to other countries.

Malekpour was charged with the crime of spreading corruption on Earth which is vaguely worded. So, basically, if you do anything that might miff the Iranian top brass and their ideologies, it might not be such a good idea to visit the country which once was a flower of human civilisation. That is unless you want to be strung up in a car park, which we can't imagine is on anyone's agenda.
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Documentary examines how toxic water at the nation’s largest Marine base damaged lives

(Gerry Broome/ASSOCIATED PRESS) - This 2007 photo shows some of the older base housing at Midway Park neighborhood at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

By Darryl Fears, Published: January 21

Mike Partain didn’t believe the rumors about a place called Baby Heaven until he visited a Jacksonville, N.C., graveyard and wandered into a section where newborns were laid to rest.

Surrounded by hundreds of tiny marble headstones, he started to cry. A documentary film crew that followed him for a story about water contamination at Camp Lejeune heard his whimpers through a microphone clipped to his clothes. The crew dashed from another part of the graveyard and found him asking, “Why them and not me?”

The scene at Jacksonville City Cemetery is among the more poignant moments in the documentary “Semper Fi: Always Faithful,” about the men, women and children affected over three decades by contaminated water at the nation’s largest Marine base. The film made the short list of 15 documentary features being considered for an Oscar; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will cut the list to five Tuesday.

“Semper Fi” follows Partain and Jerome “Jerry” Ensminger, the men credited with uncovering records showing that the amount of leaked fuel that led to water contamination was many times greater than the Marine Corps acknowledged.

A congressional hearing in 2007 revealed that the camp ignored a directive from the Navy to inspect its water systems for possible contamination and to develop a protocol for the safe disposal of hazardous compounds.

The Marine Corps at Lejeune routinely dumped fluids containing harmful chemicals, which leached into groundwater and eventually contaminated a well. For decades, buried tanks also leaked fuel, allowing the chemical benzene, a known carcinogen, into the ground nearby.

But Camp Lejeune failed to study the health risks of its water after toxic compounds were discovered in the early 1980s, and did not notify Marines and their families. Up to a million people who rotated in and out of the base from the late 1950s to the late 1980s relied on the water to drink and bathe.

The Marine Corps has said it wasn’t aware of the contaminants until the mid-1980s and that contacting the 750,000 to 1 million military personnel and civilians who lived at Camp Lejeune during those decades is too large an undertaking.

The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry sent a survey last year to about 300,000 people who lived or worked at the Marine base before 1986. The agency expects to release the findings in early 2014.

“We care about every person who has ever lived or worked at Camp Lejeune,” Capt. Kendra Hardesty, a Marine Corps spokeswoman, said last year when the surveys were being sent out. “We are concerned about these individuals and are working hard with the scientific and medical communities to try to find them answers.”

Death of daughter

Ensminger, a square-jawed ex-Marine master sergeant, is still haunted by the death of his 9-year-old daughter, Janey, from cancer in 1985. Partain, who was born at the base in 1968, is one of more than 70 men who lived there and now suffer from rare male breast cancer.

During four years of filming that ended last year, the two men heard mention of a cemetery near Camp Lejeune where hundreds of sick and malformed babies were interred.
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Chris Dodd SOPA Bribery Investigation Petition Has Thousands of Signatures

A petition asking the White House to investigate former senator Chris Dodd for allegedly bribing federal lawmakers in the fight to pass the SOPA bill has thousands of signatures so far.

The petition arose in response to comments Chris Dodd--who stepped down from his post representing Connecticut in the U.S. Senate in January of last year--made regarding his work for the Motion Picture Association to advocate for the passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The SOPA bill was shelved earlier this week after an intense opposition campaign forced some lawmakers to withdraw their support for the controversial bill, and Dodd has been critical of the successful push to stop the bill from passing.

Chris Dodd signed on as chairman of the MPAA after stepping down from the Senate last year, and he has been under fire ever since for engaging in what his opponents allege is "bribery" while pushing the SOPA bill.

See the full text of the petition at the end of this story, or view it on the White House website here.

Dodd has come under intense criticism for his role at the MPAA in the SOPA debate. He is not allowed to directly lobby in Congress, so he has acted as a coordinator of the association's activities in Washington, which were focused for the last several months in large part on passing the SOPA bill.

SOPA was ostensibly aimed at curbing rampant online piracy of intellectual propety, but its critics contended that it would restrict free speech and internet rights. Dodd said he finds such assertions are "offensive."

On Jan. 19, Chris Dodd spoke with the Hollywood Reporter about SOPA:

"Illegal conduct is not protected by the First Amendment. The Internet is not a law-free zone," Dodd told the Hollywood Reporter. "It doesn't create exceptions for illegal activity. Stealing is wrong. The First Amendment doesn't protect stealing. There's nothing in this bill in any manner, shape or form that would deprive people of their First Amendment rights."

Full text of Chris Dodd SOPA bribery petition:

"Recently on FOX News former Senator Chris Dodd said (as quoted on news site TechDirt), 'Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,' This is an open admission of bribery and a threat designed to provoke a specific policy goal. This is a brazen flouting of the "above the law" status people of Dodd's position and wealth enjoy.

We demand justice. Investigate this blatant bribery and indict every person, especially government officials and lawmakers, who is involved."
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FBI arrests Chinese programmer

The Untouchables have fingered the collar of a Chinese computer programmer claiming he stole more than $10 million worth software from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Bo Zhang, 32, from New York, worked as a contract programmer at the bank and the Feds think he copied software to an external hard drive.

The software, owned by the U.S. Treasury Department, cost about $9.5 million to develop, Reuters said.

A New York Fed spokesman said in a statement that the bank immediately investigated the suspected breach when it was uncovered and promptly referred the matter to authorities.

Zhang, who is a Chinese citizen, was released on $200,000 bail after a brief court hearing.

If he is convicted he could face a decade in one of the US's quaint prisons.

The FBI said that Zhang had admitted to copying the code onto a drive and taking it home. He told the Untouchables that he took the code "for private use and in order to ensure that it was available to him in the event that he lost his job."

Given that he is Chinese and the US does tend to see all foreigners as terrorists or spies, particularly at airports, there is an assumption that Zhang works for Chinese intelligence.

Insecurity experts said that it is more likely that it was a case of simple theft. If he was a Chinese spook they would never have given him bail and might have given him a waterboarding holiday at multiple venues across Europe.

Zhang was hired as a contract employee in May by an unnamed technology consulting company used by the Fed to work on its computers. The software was called the Government-wide Accounting and Reporting Program (GWA), and was developed to help track the billions of dollars the United States government transfers daily.

The breach was discovered when one of Zhang's colleagues told a supervisor that he had claimed to have lost a hard drive containing the code.
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