Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California Berkeley reports: The first progress report (May 24, 2010) concluded: “This disaster was preventable had existing progressive guidelines and practices been followed. This catastrophic failure appears to have resulted from multiple violations of the laws of public resource development, and its proper regulatory oversight.” The second progress report (July 15, 2010) concluded: “…these failures (to contain, control, mitigate, plan, and clean-up) appear to be deeply rooted in a multi-decade history of organizational malfunction and shortsightedness. There were multiple opportunities to properly assess the likelihoods and consequences of organizational decisions (i.e., Risk Assessment and Management) that were ostensibly driven by the management’s desire to “close the competitive gap” and improve bottom-line performance. Consequently, although there were multiple chances to do the right things in the right ways at the right times, management’s perspective failed to recognize and accept its own fallibilities despite a record of recent accidents in the U.S. and a series of promises to change BP’s safety culture.”

"In May, a shopping mall blaze in Qatar killed 19 people, most of them children at an unlicensed Doha nursery" This is, of course misinformation - what better pretext for Qatar and Saudi Arabia to enter war with Syria?

Imagine the impact on the polls if just days before Election Day, negotiations between the president and Iran dramatically broke down, intensifying an already volatile situation and fueling rumors that his Republican challenger cut a deal with a hostile enemy power to influence the election. Would you be surprised? Maybe not, if you remember what happened on the eve of the election in 1980. In that year, negotiations between President Jimmy Carter and Iran over the release of 52 American hostages collapsed on the Sunday before Election Day.

Police say they are training their staff intensively to help administer laws on search and surveillance which are now in force. The Search and Surveillance Act which took effect on Monday gives police and other officers powers to search, or keep people under surveillance, without a warrant in situations of emergency or urgency.

Rolling Stone exposes how the FBI has become an active terror organization operating in the US, routinely planning attacks against American citizens and framing non-violent activists. "The government has a responsibility to prevent harm," says former FBI counter-terrorism agent Michael German, now the senior policy counsel for the ACLU. "What they're doing instead is manufacturing threatening events."

A company whose software and services are used to remotely administer and monitor large sections of the energy industry began warning customers last week that it is investigating a sophisticated hacker attack spanning its operations in the United States, Canada and Spain. Experts say digital fingerprints left behind by attackers point to a Chinese hacking group tied to repeated cyber-espionage campaigns against key Western interests. In letters sent to customers last week, Telvent Canada Ltd. said that on Sept. 10, 2012 it learned of a breach of its internal firewall and security systems. Telvent said the attacker(s) installed malicious software and stole project files related to one of its core offerings — OASyS SCADA — a product that helps energy firms mesh older IT assets with more advanced “smart grid” technologies.

Back in February [Techdirt] wrote about the ominously-named "Clean IT" project in Europe, designed to combat the use of the Internet by terrorists. At that time, [they] suspected that this would produce some seriously bad ideas, but a leaked document obtained by EDRI shows that these are actually much worse than feared, amounting to a system of continuous surveillance, extrajudicial removal of content and some new proposals that can only be described as deranged. Here's EDRI's summary of the central issue: "The leaked document contradicts a letter sent from CleanIT Coordinator But Klaasen to Dutch NGO Bits of Freedom in April of this year, which explained that the project would first identify problems before making policy proposals. The promise to defend the rule of law has been abandoned. There appears never to have been a plan to identify a specific problem to be solved -- instead the initiative has become little more than a protection racket (use filtering or be held liable for terrorist offences) for the online security industry."

Seven rent-to-own companies and a software developer have settled federal charges that they spied on customers, including watching them having sex. The companies captured screenshots of confidential and personal information, logged keystrokes and took webcam pictures of people in their homes. Their aim was to track the computers belonging to costomers who were behind with their payments. ... It's not the first time that a rental company has come under fire for using PC Rental Agent in this way. Last year, a Wyoming couple sued rental company Aaron's after discovering that their PC had been taking webcam pictures of them at home.

AUSTRALIA'S security and law enforcement agencies are world leaders in telecommunications interception and data access and like most successful industries, they want more. Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon is canvassing a further expansion of surveillance powers, most controversially a requirement that telecommunications and internet service providers retain at least two years of data for access by government agencies. Security and privacy are in the balance as the Federal Parliament's secretive joint committee on intelligence and security considers Australia's future digital surveillance regime.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday said it was giving the Transportation Security Administration until the end of March to comport with an already 14-month-old order to “promptly” hold public hearings and take public comment concerning the so-called nude body scanners installed in U.S. airport security checkpoints.