Day: February 11, 2020💾

📽️ Videos

Who Runs the Transit System?

|

Who Runs the Transit System?

Once upon a time in the Great City, Hugh L. Carey, one of New York’s best modern governors, and certainly its most underrated, pledged not to raise the 50 cent fare on the subways and buses. Swiftly, the man Carey had picked to chair the system, Richard Ravitch, contradicted him.

The fare, Ravitch explained, was the difference between how much money was needed to properly maintain and operate the system and how much the state, the city and others put in. Math, in other words, not politics.

Afterward, Carey, raised in the gentle arts of Brooklyn politics, summoned Ravitch to dinner at one of the Governor’s favorite midtown watering holes. In the hardball of New York, the menu would be expected to include a dressing down. Which is why to this day Ravitch loves to repeat what the governor actually said next: “Dick, thanks for getting me off the hook. Don’t pay any attention to what I say.”

That was then.

This is now. “Train Daddy” Andy Byford came and went faster than a speeding A train, the casualty of Governor Cuomo’s penchant to “micro-manage” a system he is bound by state law to keep his hands off of.

How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades – Washington Post

|

How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades – Washington Post

National Security ‘The intelligence coup of the century’ For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries. By Greg Miller Feb. 11, 2020

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

Raw Milk Deal : Planet Money : NPR

|

Episode 970: Raw Milk Deal : Planet Money : NPR

In the early 2000s, dairy farmer Mark McAfee was willing to risk it all, trucking unpasteurized raw milk hundreds of miles to rabid raw milk evangelists in the back-alleys of California. And it paid off — big. Even Martin Sheen and his wife joined the cause.

But when Mark started moving that raw white across state lines, the Feds got involved. So we wondered — Is raw milk a social menace, or a right?