NYC: Delivery man stabbed in midtown Manhattan

A delivery man was stabbed Friday night outside Pennsylvania Station… the 37-year-old victim was stabbed in the forearm, ribs, back, and face.  The suspect is an adult male who fled the scene and remains unidentified… Source: Delivery man stabbed in midtown

FBI: Sheldon Silver – NY Assembly Speaker – Arrested

Excerpted from AP — New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver – a Manhattan Democrat – was arrested Thursday on public corruption charges, accused of using his position to obtain millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks masked as legitimate income.

” An Orthodox Jew of eastern European descent, Silver has lived all his life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He lives with his wife Rosa a few blocks from their children and her parents. He graduated from the Rabbi Jacob Joseph High School on Manhattan’s Henry Street. He was athletic and captain of the basketball team. He spent his undergraduate years at Yeshiva University and obtained a law degree from Brooklyn Law School. ..” Wikipedia

The 70-year-old Silver was taken into custody around 8 a.m. at the FBI’s New York City office, FBI spokesman Peter Donald confirmed.  Silver faces five counts, including conspiracy and bribery charges. He was expected to make a court appearance later Thursday… According to a criminal complaint, Silver “received more than $6 million in outside income from two law firms since late 2002.”  Authorities said Silver abused power.

“Silver used the power and influence of his official position to obtain for himself millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks masked as legitimate income earned by Silver as private lawyer,” the complaint said…

The Democrat from Manhattan’s Lower East Side has served as speaker for more than two decades.  The arrest sent shock waves through Albany as a new legislative session has begun and it came just a day after Silver shared the stage with Gov. Andrew Cuomo during his State of the State address.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara took over the files of New York’s Moreland anti-corruption commission after Cuomo closed it in April. He said in October that investigations into Albany’s pay-to-play politics are continuing.  The commission and Bharara were looking into lawmakers’ earnings outside their state salaries. Silver’s outside income has long been a subject of discussion and controversy. Last year, he reported making up to $750,000 for legal work, mostly with the trial firm of Weitz & Luxenberg.

When the commission began to investigate public corruption in 2013, including outside income earned by Silver and other state legislators, “Silver took legal action and other steps to prevent the disclosure of such information,” the complaint said.  Following news of his arrest, NYGOP spokesman David Laska released a statement saying it was “another sad day for New York” and called on Silver to “immediately resign from the State Assembly.”

E-ZPass Tracked All Over New York City | Drudge Retort

Indiĝenaj Inteligenteco

Daily Finance: Puking Monkey is an electronics tinkerer, so he hacked his RFID-enabled E-ZPass to set off a light and a “moo cow” every time it was being read. Then he drove around New York. His tag got milked multiple times on the short drive from Times Square to Madison Square Garden in mid-town Manhattan. This isn’t a part of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, the millions-dollar project emulating London’s Ring of Steel with extreme surveillance.

via E-ZPass Tracked All Over New York City | Drudge Retort.

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Leave Your Cellphone at Home – an Interview with Jacob Appelbaum | n + 1

Earlier this year in Wired, writer and intelligence expert James Bamford described the National Security Agency’s plans for the Utah Data Center. A nondescript name, but it has another: the First Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center. The $2 billion facility, scheduled to open in September 2013, will be used to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store the agency’s intercepted communications—everything from emails, cell phone calls, Google searches, and Tweets, to retail transactions. How will all this data be stored? Imagine, if you can, 100,000 square-feet filled with row upon row of servers, stacked neatly on racks. Bamford projects that its processing-capacity may aspire to yottabytes, or 10²⁴ bytes, and for which no neologism of higher magnitude has yet been coined.