Witchy Woman

SPIEGEL published two pieces this morning about the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division, aka premier hacking ninja squad. According to Snowden documents, TAO has a catalog of all the commercial equipment that carries NSA backdoors. And it’s a who’s who of a list. Storage products from Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung have backdoors in their firmware, firewalls from Juniper Networks have been compromised, plus networking equipment from Cisco and Huawei, and even unspecified products from Dell. TAO actually intercepts online orders of these and other electronics to bug them.

"The lady looked at me,” said Vindiola. “I thought she was going to put money in the kettle. She came up to me and said, 'Do you believe in God?' And she says, ‘You're supposed to say Merry Christmas,' and that's when she hit me."

BP fired a top executive after warning her that braiding her hair and wearing dashikis made her colleagues "uncomfortable," and that she should do so only "during 'culture day' [or] black history month," the former West Coast CFO claims in court.