Topeka man, 89, files suit against Edward Snowden, documentary producers

When Horace Edwards saw a recent showing of the documentary Citizenfour, which chronicles former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowdens leak of classified documents, he was aghast.

I was kind of amazed a bit shocked, I guess as it dawned on me what it was a story about, Edwards, 89, said Wednesday at his west Topeka home.

So I got indignant. Then I got angry. So it occurred to me that instead of this being something else were going to complain about, what can I do?

What Edwards did was contact a longtime friend, Shawnee-based attorney Jean Lamfers, and filed a lawsuit requesting that a constructive trust be imposed to prevent Snowden and the films producers from profiting.

This deters breaches of fiduciary duty, addresses irreparable damage to the safety of the American people and prevents dangerous disruption of foreign affairs due to irresponsible conduct of disloyal government operatives and entertainment industry collaborators, the lawsuit states.

Named as defendants in the suit, which was filed Dec. 19 in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., are Snowden, Praxis Films Inc., Participant Media, The Weinstein Company and producers Laura Poitras, Diane Weyermann and Jeffrey Skoll. Attempts to contact several defendants Wednesday werent successful.

Snowden was working as an NSA contractor for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton when, in the summer of 2013, he released thousands of documents to journalists, revealing the agencys national and international surveillance efforts. He was charged with violating the Espionage Act and has spent the past 18 months in asylum inside Russia.

Edwards, who served in the Navy during World War II, says he was granted a number of security clearances by the Atomic Energy Commission while working as an engineer in the 1950s and 60s. But, he says, he never considered leaking classified documents.

It never even dawned on me, Edwards said.

Edwards went on to serve as president and CEO of ARCO Pipeline Co. before becoming the secretary of the Kansas Department of Transportation in 1987. In 2004, he attempted to challenge incumbent Sen. Sam Brownback but was unable to obtain enough signatures to be placed on the ballot as an independent candidate.

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Topeka man, 89, files suit against Edward Snowden, documentary producers

Backlash in Berlin over NSA spying recedes as threat from …

BERLIN In a crescendo of anger over American espionage, Germany expelled the CIAs top operative, launched an investigation of the vast U.S. surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden and extracted an apology from President Obama for the years that U.S. spies had reportedly spent monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkels cellphone.

In an address to Parliament last year, Merkel warned that U.S.-German cooperation would be curtailed and declared that trust needs to be rebuilt.

But the cooperation never really stopped. The public backlash over Snowden often obscured a more complicated reality for Germany and other aggrieved U.S. allies. They may be dismayed by the omnivorous nature of the intelligence apparatus the United States has built since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but they are also deeply dependent on it.

Over the past year, Germany has secretly provided detailed information to U.S. spy services on hundreds of German citizens and legal residents suspected of having joined insurgent groups in Syria and Iraq, U.S. and German officials said.

Germany has done so reluctantly to enlist U.S. help in tracking departed fighters, determining whether they have joined al-Qaeda or the Islamic State and, perhaps most importantly, whether they might seek to bring those groups violent agendas back to Germany.

The stream of information includes names, cellphone numbers, e-mail addresses and other sensitive data that German security services ever mindful of the abuses by the Nazi and Stasi secret police have been reluctant even to collect, let alone turn over to a suspect ally.

A senior German intelligence official compared the U.S. relationship to a dysfunctional marriage in which trust has bottomed out but a breakup is not an option. Amid what Germans see as evidence of repeated betrayal, the question remaining is whether the husband is a notorious cheater or can be faithful again, said the official, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. Were just going to have to give it another try. There is no alternative. Divorce is out of the question.

More than 550 German citizens have gone to Syria, officials said, and at least nine have killed themselves in suicide attacks.

The exodus is part of a much broader flow of more than 15,000 foreign fighters who have entered Syria over the past four years from 80 countries. At least 3,000 of them are from Europe the largest contingent of Islamist jihadists with Western passports that counterterrorism agencies have ever faced.

As a result, nearly every country in Europe is turning over significant data on their own departed fighters to the United States. Some of these nations, including Germany, have capable security and intelligence agencies of their own. But even their combined resources probably cannot match the scope and reach of their U.S. counterparts.

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Backlash in Berlin over NSA spying recedes as threat from ...

Bitcoin hoping to see a big 2015

The key to bitcoin finding more users in 2015 might lie in government regulation, experts said. Increased consumer protection, they said, would boost adoption as it both legitimizes the technology and reassures those on the fence about buying into the cryptocurrency world.

"If the average Joe sees that the U.S. government has OK'd this technology and given guidelines for this technology to be built on, in their eyes that's legitimacy," Sullivan said.

Governments around the world are currently considering bitcoin regulation. Within the U.S. this charge has been led by the BitLicense currently under revision by Benjamin Lawsky, New York state superintendent of financial services. This license would certify businesses managing bitcoin transactions and require them to maintain certain records.

Read MoreBitcoin: Lawsky softens 'BitLicense' requirements

Lawsky's office said earlier this month that the license should be finalized by early 2015.

Regulation will not only boost consumer confidence in the technology, but it will also remove many of the barriers preventing more companies and investors from becoming involved in the space, SecondMarket's O'Connor said.

"We are very close to getting a regulatory framework in place, and that will be a huge boon for the industry," he said. "Once it's more black and white, you are going to see more institutional folks buying into the asset class, and the price will go up."

There are also challenges to overcome with the perception of bitcoin as a tool for crime. Earlier this month a district court sentenced high-profile bitcoin advocate, Charlie Shrem, to two years in prison for indirectly sending $1 million in bitcoin to the Silk Roadan online black market known for selling illegal drugs.

Read MoreIs Apple Pay a bitcoin killer?

A reputation shift, bitcoin experts said, could come from increased company adoption and financial investment.

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Bitcoin hoping to see a big 2015

Bitcoin backers hoping 2015 will be the big one

The key to bitcoin finding more users in 2015 might lie in government regulation, experts said. Increased consumer protection, they said, would boost adoption as it both legitimizes the technology and reassures those on the fence about buying into the cryptocurrency world.

"If the average Joe sees that the U.S. government has OK'd this technology and given guidelines for this technology to be built on, in their eyes that's legitimacy," Sullivan said.

Governments around the world are currently considering bitcoin regulation. Within the U.S. this charge has been led by the BitLicense currently under revision by Benjamin Lawsky, New York state superintendent of financial services. This license would certify businesses managing bitcoin transactions and require them to maintain certain records.

Read MoreBitcoin: Lawsky softens 'BitLicense' requirements

Lawsky's office said earlier this month that the license should be finalized by early 2015.

Regulation will not only boost consumer confidence in the technology, but it will also remove many of the barriers preventing more companies and investors from becoming involved in the space, SecondMarket's O'Connor said.

"We are very close to getting a regulatory framework in place, and that will be a huge boon for the industry," he said. "Once it's more black and white, you are going to see more institutional folks buying into the asset class, and the price will go up."

There are also challenges to overcome with the perception of bitcoin as a tool for crime. Earlier this month a district court sentenced high-profile bitcoin advocate, Charlie Shrem, to two years in prison for indirectly sending $1 million in bitcoin to the Silk Roadan online black market known for selling illegal drugs.

Read MoreIs Apple Pay a bitcoin killer?

A reputation shift, bitcoin experts said, could come from increased company adoption and financial investment.

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Bitcoin backers hoping 2015 will be the big one

MegaCryption Adds Record-Level Encryption Adapter for Innovative Cryptography Options

(PRWEB) December 31, 2014

MegaCryption now offers the ability to encrypt and decrypt individual records for usage in a specific program or transaction, commonly known as record-level encryption, through its Record-Level Encryption Adapter (RLEA). As a record-level and file-level cryptography solution, MegaCryption provides a comprehensive approach to encrypting virtually any record and file in your z/OS environment while complementing any communication level encryption process you may already have in place. MegaCryption offers support of the most secure non-proprietary and well-known algorithms available today, ensuring security and compatibility with other standard implementations.

RLE, intended to enable an end user to select the specific record data they wish to encrypt or decrypt, is often a process which requires extensive re-design and programming. Unlike other RLE applications, MegaCryptions RLEA provides a conversion utility to ease the implementation burden while providing increased encryption options for the end user. The conversion utility automatically adapts legacy applications to use MegaCryption without extensive analysis, design, or programming changes, while also pre-processing batch or CICS COBOL programs and generating new source modules which have additional logic inserted into them to perform the encryption/decryption operations on individual records.

Easing the implementation process is not the only user-friendly feature within MegaCryptions RLEA. When utilizing MegaCryptions RLEA, the end user does not have to calculate field offsets within record structures to accommodate primary and alternate keys, nor do they have to count bytes for fields in encryption operations. MegaCryptions RLEA works with COBOL programs, as well as fixed-length sequential or VSAM records, and provides high performance from highly optimized encryption.

Along with MegaCryption for z/OS, ASPG offers MegaCryption-PC and MegaCryption-IX, the fastest growing encryption tool for file cryptography on Windows, Unix, and Linux computers. MegaCryption-PC, for Windows, and MegaCryption-IX, for Unix and Linux, may be freely distributed for use on Windows, Unix, or Linux systems and are compatible with both OpenPGP and S/MIME cryptography standards.

ABOUT ADVANCED SOFTWARE PRODUCTS GROUP For nearly 30 years, ASPG, an IBM and Microsoft partner, has produced award-winning software for data centers worldwide, specializing in data security, storage administration, and systems productivity. ASPG is pleased to provide solutions for a majority of the GLOBAL 1000 data centers.

For more information about ASPG, please contact our Sales Team by phone at 800-662-6090 (Toll-Free) or 239-649-1548 (US/International), 239-649-6391 (fax) or email at aspgsales(at)aspg(dot)com. You can also visit the ASPG website at http://www.aspg.com.

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MegaCryption Adds Record-Level Encryption Adapter for Innovative Cryptography Options