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Child describes details of torture and mistreatment during his arrest > Boy, 14, told reporters he was stripped, spit on and beaten by Israeli soldiers during 24-hour interrogation.

How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware

by Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald | TheIntercept

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks. The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic. In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites. The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.”

Each of these plants is over 2,000 years old. 

Rachel Sussman is on a quest to celebrate the resilience of life by identifying and photographing the world’s oldest continuous-living organisms. The plants you see above, from top to bottom:

1. Jomon Sugi, Japanese Cedar (2,180 to 7,000 years old, Yaku Shima, Japan)

2. Clonal Mojave Yucca (12,000+ years old, Mojave Desert, California)

3. La Llareta (3,000 years old, Atacama Desert, Chile) 

4. Pando, Clonal Quaking Aspen (80,000 years old, Fish Lake, Utah)

5. Welwitschia Mirabilis (2,000 years old, Namib Naukluft Desert, Namibia)

6. Sagole Baobab (2,000 years  old, Limpopo Province, South Africa)

7. Spruce Gran Picea (9,550 years old, Fulufjället, Sweden)