Crashes of Convenience: Michael Hastings

Michael Hastings was that rarest of breeds: a mainstream reporter who was not afraid to rail against the system, kick back against the establishment, and bite the hand that feeds him. On the morning of June 18, 2013, he died in a fiery car crash. But now details are emerging that he was on the verge of breaking an important new story about the CIA, and believed he was being investigated by the FBI. Now even a former counter-terrorism czar is admitting Hastings' car may have been cyber-hijacked. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we explore the strange details surrounding the untimely death of Michael Hastings.

Published: July 05, 2013

Michael Hastings Sent Email About FBI Probe Tailing Him Hours Before Death

Published: June 28, 2013

What happened to Michael Hastings.? The revelation that Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings was working on a story about the CIA before his death and had contacted a Wikileaks lawyer about being under investigation by the FBI hours before his car exploded into flames has bolstered increasingly valid claims that the 33-year-old was assassinated.

Hastings died last week in Hollywood when his car hit a tree at high speed.

According to a prominent security analyst, technology exists that could've allowed someone to hack his car. Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard Clarke told The Huffington Post that what is known about the single-vehicle crash is "consistent with a car cyber attack."

Clarke said, "There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers" — including the United States — know how to remotely seize control of a car.

"What has been revealed as a result of some research at universities is that it's relatively easy to hack your way into the control system of a car, and to do such things as cause acceleration when the driver doesn't want acceleration, to throw on the brakes when the driver doesn't want the brakes on, to launch an air bag," Clarke told The Huffington Post. "You can do some really highly destructive things now, through hacking a car, and it's not that hard."

It's possible that Hastings car was hacked considering the people he had written about in his past and what he recently had been talking about.

Kathleen Fisher from DARPA recently did a presentation on the ease of hacking a standard American sedan. Volvo started the SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) program in 2009 and they are now reporting that their testing has been "successfully completed." Hacking of a lemmings train like Volvo's, could lead to massive collisions on the roads and there should be major security concerns considering what recently has been learned.

Hours before dying in a fiery car crash, award-winning journalist Michael Hastings sent an email to his colleagues, warning that federal authorities were interviewing his friends and that he needed to go "off the rada[r]" for a bit.

The email was sent around 1 p.m. on Monday, June 17. At 4:20 a.m. the following morning, Hastings died when his Mercedes, traveling at high speeds, smashed into a tree and caught on fire. He was 33.

Hastings sent the email to staff at BuzzFeed, where he was employed, but also blind-copied a friend, Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, on the message. Biggs, who Hastings met in 2008 when he was embedded in his unit in Afghanistan, forwarded the email to KTLA, who posted it online on Saturday.

Here's the email, with the recipients' names redacted.

Subject: FBI Investigation, re: NSA

Hey (redacted names) -- the Feds are interviewing my "close friends and associates." Perhaps if the authorities arrive "BuzzFeed GQ," er HQ, may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues.

Also: I am onto a big story, and need to go off the rada[r] for a bit.

All the best, and hope to see you all soon. Michael

Where is Edward Snowden? Glenn Greenwald on Asylum Request, Espionage Charge; More Leaks to Come

The international mystery surrounding National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has deepened after the former U.S. intelligence contractor failed to board a flight as expected from Moscow to Havana today. Snowden reportedly arrived in Moscow Sunday after fleeing Hong Kong. The developments come just days after the United States publicly revealed it had filed espionage charges against Snowden for theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorized person. “The idea that he has harmed national security is truly laughable,” says Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA surveillance stories. “If you go and look at what it is that we published, the only things that we published were reports that the U.S. government was spying not on the terrorists or the Chinese government, but on American citizens indiscriminately.”

Disruptions: Ingestible Medicine That Monitors You

- By NICK BILTON - June 23, 2013 - The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — They look like normal pills, oblong and a little smaller than a daily vitamin. But if your doctor writes a prescription for these pills in the not-too-distant future, you might hear a new twist on an old cliché: “Take two of these ingestible computers, and they will e-mail me in the morning.”

As society struggles with the privacy implications of wearable computers like Google Glass, scientists, researchers and some start-ups are already preparing the next, even more intrusive wave of computing: ingestible computers and minuscule sensors stuffed inside pills.

Although these tiny devices are not yet mainstream, some people on the cutting edge are already swallowing them to monitor a range of health data and wirelessly share this information with a doctor. And there are prototypes of tiny, ingestible devices that can do things like automatically open car doors or fill in passwords.

For people in extreme professions, like space travel, various versions of these pills have been used for some time. But in the next year, your family doctor — at least if he’s technologically adept — could also have them in his medicinal tool kit.

Inside these pills are tiny sensors and transmitters. You swallow them with water, or milk if you’d prefer. After that, the devices make their way to the stomach and stay intact as they travel through the intestinal tract.

“You will — voluntarily, I might add — take a pill, which you think of as a pill but is in fact a microscopic robot, which will monitor your systems” and wirelessly transmit what is happening, Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, said last fall at a company conference. “If it makes the difference between health and death, you’re going to want this thing.”

One of the pills, made by Proteus Digital Health, a small company in Redwood City, Calif., does not need a battery. Instead, the body is the power source. Just as a potato can power a light bulb, Proteus has added magnesium and copper on each side of its tiny sensor, which generates just enough electricity from stomach acids.

As a Proteus pill hits the bottom of the stomach, it sends information to a cellphone app through a patch worn on the body. The tiny computer can track medication-taking behaviors — “did Grandma take her pills today, and what time?” — and monitor how a patient’s body is responding to medicine. It also detects the person’s movements and rest patterns.

Executives at the company, which recently raised $62.5 million from investors, say they believe that these pills will help patients with physical and neurological problems. People with heart failure-related difficulties could monitor blood flow and body temperature; those with central nervous system issues, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, could take the pills to monitor vital signs in real time. The Food and Drug Administration approved the Proteus pill last year.

A pill called the CorTemp Ingestible Core Body Temperature Sensor, made by HQ Inc. in Palmetto, Fla., has a built-in battery and wirelessly transmits real-time body temperature as it travels through a patient.

Firefighters, football players, soldiers and astronauts have used the device so their employers can monitor them and ensure they do not overheat in high temperatures. CorTemp began in 2006 as a research collaboration from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Lee Carbonelli, HQ’s marketing director, said the company hoped, in the next year, to have a consumer version that would wirelessly communicate to a smartphone app.

Future generations of these pills could even be convenience tools.

Last month, Regina Dugan, senior vice president for Motorola Mobility’s advanced technology and projects group, showed off an example, along with wearable radio frequency identification tattoos that attach to the skin like a sticker, at the D: All Things Digital technology conference.

Once that pill is in your body, you could pick up your smartphone and not have to type in a password. Instead, you are the password. Sit in the car and it will start. Touch the handle to your home door and it will automatically unlock. “Essentially, your entire body becomes your authentication token,” Ms. Dugan said.

But if people are worried about the privacy implications of wearable computing devices, just wait until they try to wrap their heads around ingestible computing.

“This is yet another one of these technologies where there are wonderful options and terrible options, simultaneously,” said John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group. “The wonderful is that there are a great number of things you want to know about yourself on a continual basis, especially if you’re diabetic or suffer from another disease. The terrible is that health insurance companies could know about the inner workings of your body.”

And the implications of a tiny computer inside your body being hacked? Let’s say they are troubling.

There is, of course, one last question for this little pill. After it has done its job, flowing down around the stomach and through the intestinal tract, what happens next?

“It passes naturally through the body in about 24 hours,” Ms. Carbonelli said, but since each pill costs $46, “some people choose to recover and recycle it.”

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