Month: July 2016

Now that criminal charges are off the table in the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, the State Department is taking up its own investigation once again, looking into the mishandling of classified information by Clinton, her staff, and other State Department employees who forwarded classified information via State’s unclassified e-mail system. According to the Associated Press, State Department spokesperson John Kirby said that State had held up its own review, started in January, until the completion of the FBI investigation.

While Clinton’s core staff left the department shortly after she did, the State investigation could have material impact on the future careers of Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills, and deputy chiefs of staff Jacob Sullivan and Huma Abedin—including the revocation of security clearances and blocking of any future access to a security clearance. The actions would be kept on file, Kirby said; they could block them from top jobs if Clinton is elected president. Sullivan has been said to have been a top candidate for the position of National Security adviser in a Clinton administration. Some of Clinton’s former State staff still hold security clearances, according to reports.

All three sent information later determined to be classified—some of it as highly as Top Secret /Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) via State’s unclassified e-mail system to Clinton’s private, unsecured e-mail server. But as revealed during a hearing of the House Oversight Committee Thursday, as many as 1,000 State Department employees were connected to classified information sent through the unclassified e-mail system that found its way into Clinton’s server—almost all of it unmarked with classification information, and some of it including information about CIA and other Intelligence Community personnel and assets overseas.

Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota on Thursday asked the Department of Justice to investigate the killing of a black motorist shot by a white police officer. Philando Castile's dying moments were live-streamed on Facebook, and the incident prompted a comment from President Barack Obama.

Dayton said he wanted an "immediate independent federal investigation into this matter." The governor suggested that racism was to blame for the killing of Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria manager, who was shot at least four times by a police officer after being pulled over for a broken taillight in Falcon Heights.

"Would this have happened if those passengers, the driver and the passengers, were white?," Dayton told a news conference Thursday. "I don’t think it would have. So I’m forced to confront, and I think all of us in Minnesota are forced to confront, that this kind of racism exists."

Two nearly identical lawsuits have been recently filed against the Valve Corporation over an alleged "illegal scheme" that revolves around the online game Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and more defendants have been added to one of those cases.

First came a June 23 filing in federal court in Connecticut, while another July 1 filing in federal court in southern Florida was amended Thursday to also include CSGOLotto.com, a third-party site that facilitates betting of CS:GO items, and two defendants who operate that particular Florida-based website.

Those two defendants' names may sound familiar to anyone following the cases in question: popular YouTube video game streamers Trevor "TmarTn" Martin and Tom "Syndicate" Cassell. Martin and Cassell were recently exposed for endorsing CSGOLotto as a get-rich-quick gambling site... without identifying themselves as the site's owners and operators.

A 22-year-old Illinois man named Bryton Mellott decided to celebrate July Fourth by burning the US flag and posting pictures of his actions on Facebook. The actions led to his arrest by local police, national press attention, and threats against his life.

“I am not proud to be an American," wrote Mellott, in a Facebook post that he later deleted. "In this moment, being proud of my country is to ignore the atrocities committed against people of color, people living in poverty, people who identify as women, and against my own queer community on a daily basis."

The photo remains up, with the accompanying hashtag "#betterburnthatflag."

According to a contract seen by Recode, Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer struck a deal with Mozilla in 2014 specifying annual payments of $375 million to the browser creator in exchange for Yahoo's search engine appearing in the default position on Firefox. That $375 million price tag will be paid out every year until 2019 one way or another—even if Mozilla doesn’t like the company that buys Yahoo and decides to walk away.

Of course, if Mozilla decides it likes whichever company buys the embattled search giant, then payments continue as before and the new owner of Yahoo’s search engine retains the default position on the browser.

The trick is, then, finding a buyer who is committed to keeping Yahoo’s search product robust, Recode says, at least for the next three years. If a potential buyer was thinking of abandoning search, however, that could come at a very steep price, as it would send Mozilla searching for a better search engine to serve up to its users.