A Kentucky Republican operative named David Adams is doing everything he can to drive Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell crazy.
Adams, a self-styled tea party activist who worked on Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s 2010 primary campaign, is regularly quoted in national media outlets lambasting McConnell, who faces re-election in 2014, and he is making an active effort to recruit a tea partier to challenge McConnell in the GOP primary. The McConnell campaign has attacked him back, creating a public conflict between the tea party and the so-called establishment senator, even as a seemingly unlikely alliance has emerged between McConnell and the more anti-establishment Paul.
A serious challenger to McConnell, who has a 44 percent approval rating according to a May Public Policy Polling poll conducted for Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic group, has yet to materialize. But for the past few weeks, Adams has been announcing to the press that he has found such a challenger. He will not, however, say whom.
“That’s going very well. No timeline. We’re just enjoying immensely watching the McConnell team flail around blindly,” Adams told The Daily Caller in a phone interview Friday. “We’ve got a little bit of time to just sit back and enjoy that. So that’s what we’re doing.”
Adams suggests his expertise stems from his time as Paul’s campaign manager during his 2010 primary election, but Kentucky operatives who worked with Adams on that and other campaigns were skeptical of Adams’ claims and his influence.
“I wore my car out traveling around all over the state trying to help a guy who was a virtual unknown become elected to the U.S Senate. Worked my guts out,” Adams said of his time on the Paul campaign. He parted ways with the campaign after the primary, he said, to go work on Phil Moffett’s unsuccessful gubernatorial bid, something he said he was “setting some groundwork for” before he joined the Paul campaign.
Other people from the Paul campaign tell the story differently, describing Adams as a likable person, but a poor campaign manager.
“David Adams? The guy we fired? He’s just so incompetent,” Jesse Benton, who managed Paul’s campaign after he won the Republican primary and is currently managing McConnell’s campaign, told TheDC in March, regarding Adams’ efforts to find a challenger to McConnell.
Emails sent across the Web are like postcards. In some cases, they're readable by anyone standing between you and its recipient. That can include your webmail company, your Internet service provider and whoever is tapped into the fiber optic cable passing your message around the globe — not to mention a parallel set of observers on the recipient's side of the world.
Experts recommend encryption, which scrambles messages in transit, so they're unreadable to anyone trying to intercept them. Techniques vary, but a popular one is called PGP, short for “Pretty Good Privacy.” PGP is effective enough that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, arguing that it was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.
Like emails, your travels around the Internet can easily be tracked by anyone standing between you and the site you're trying to reach. TOR, short for “The Onion Router,” helps make your traffic anonymous by bouncing it through a network of routers before spitting it back out on the other side. Each trip through a router provides another layer of protection, thus the onion reference.
Originally developed by the U.S. military, TOR is believed to work pretty well if you want to hide your traffic from, let's say, eavesdropping by your local Internet service provider.
And criminals' use of TOR has so frustrated Japanese police that experts there recently recommended restricting its use. But it's worth noting that TOR may be ineffective against governments equipped with the powers of global surveillance.
Your everyday cellphone has all kinds of privacy problems. In general, proprietary software, lousy encryption, hard-to-delete data and other security issues make a cellphone a bad bet for storing information you'd rather not share.
An even bigger issue is that cellphones almost always follow their owners around, logging the location of every call, something that could effectively give governments a daily digest of your everyday life.
Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum has described cellphones as tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. If you're not happy with the idea of an intelligence agency following your footsteps across town, leave the phone at home.
Read the full story at www.smartcardfactory.com!
No comments:
Post a Comment