NATO troop activities during Exercise "Arctic Express," Norway, 1970 HD Stock Footage – Video

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NATO troop activities during Exercise "Arctic Express," Norway, 1970 HD Stock Footage
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NATO troop activities during Exercise "Arctic Express," Norway, 1970 HD Stock Footage - Video

Italian operations in Norway during NATO exercise "Arctic Express." HD Stock Footage – Video

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Italian operations in Norway during NATO exercise "Arctic Express." HD Stock Footage
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Italian operations in Norway during NATO exercise "Arctic Express." HD Stock Footage - Video

NATO top commander: Russian troops won't enter eastern Ukraine

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OTTAWA (Reuters) - NATO's top military commander in Europe said on Monday he no longer thought regular Russian troops would enter eastern Ukraine, predicting Moscow could achieve its goals through the unconventional forces stirring up trouble there.

U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove said it was a completely false Russian narrative that it was only Ukrainians rebelling in the east of their country, saying it was clear that special forces troops from Russia were operating there as they did in Crimea before its annexation.

"Remember that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin denied their presence and now he has admitted to their presence in Crimea. The same thing will come out of Ukraine as time rolls out," he told a military and diplomatic audience in Ottawa.

"Exactly what we saw in Crimea is being mirrored in eastern Ukraine," added Breedlove.

Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops on its border with eastern Ukraine, prompting fears that Moscow might send ground forces in to protect the rights of ethnic Russians.

Breedlove said that until a week ago, he thought the most likely military response from Russia would be to send in troops to southern Ukraine and secure a land bridge to the peninsula of Crimea - which voted in March to join Russia - before possibly pushing on toward the Black Sea port of Odessa and then further west toward Moldova.

"Today I would tell you I don't think that's the most likely course of action ... I think now that Putin may be able to accomplish his objectives in eastern Ukraine and never go across the border with his forces," he said.

"Now I think probably the most likely course of action is that he will continue doing what he's doing - discrediting the government, creating unrest, trying to set the stage for a separatist movement," and that would make it easier to cement Moscow's military and economic hold on eastern Ukraine, Breedlove added.

"In that case, I think it's the most troublesome for NATO because if the forces do not come across the border, my guess is that many will want to try to quickly go back to business as usual, and I, for one, do not believe annexing Crimea is business as usual."

Shortly before his public remarks, Breedlove discussed Ukraine and Russia in a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who told reporters beforehand that the escalation of violence in Ukraine appeared clearly to be "a slow-motion invasion on the part of the Putin regime."

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NATO top commander: Russian troops won't enter eastern Ukraine

NATO commander says Russia may achieve goals without invading Ukraine

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NATO's top military commander in Europe said on Monday he no longer thought regular Russian troops would enter eastern Ukraine, predicting Moscow could achieve its goals through the unconventional forces stirring up trouble there.

U.S. air force Gen.Philip Breedlove said it was a completely false Russian narrative that it was only Ukrainians rebelling in the east of their country, saying it was clear that special forces troops from Russia were operating there as they did in Crimea before its annexation.

"Remember that [Russian President Vladimir]Putin denied their presence and now he has admitted to their presence in Crimea. The same thing will come out of Ukraine as time rolls out," he told a military and diplomatic audience in Ottawa.

Breedloveis embarking on two days of talks with Canadian political and military leaders just as heavy clashes erupt between Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine's eastern region.

He met briefly with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Defence Minister Rob Nicholson and Chief of the Defence StaffGen. Tom Lawson.

"Exactly what we saw in Crimea is being mirrored in eastern Ukraine," added Breedlove.

Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops on its border with eastern Ukraine, prompting fears that Moscow might send ground forces in to protect the rights of ethnic Russians.

Breedlove said that until a week ago, he thought the most likely military response from Russia would be to send in troops to southern Ukraine and secure a land bridge to the peninsula of Crimea which voted in March to join Russia before possibly pushing on toward the Black Sea port of Odesa and then farther west toward Moldova.

"Today I would tell you I don't think that's the most likely course of action ... I think now that Putin may be able to accomplish his objectives in eastern Ukraine and never go across the border with his forces," he said.

"Now I think probably the most likely course of action is that he will continue doing what he's doing discrediting the government, creating unrest, trying to set the stage for a separatist movement," and that would make it easier to cement Moscow's military and economic hold on eastern Ukraine, Breedlove added.

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NATO commander says Russia may achieve goals without invading Ukraine

NATO: Russia can achieve its goals in Ukraine without invading

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NATO's top military commander in Europe said yesterday (5 May) he no longer thought regular Russian troops would enter eastern Ukraine, predicting Moscow could achieve its goals through the unconventional forces stirring up trouble there.

US Air Force General Philip Breedlove said it was a completely false Russian narrative that it was only Ukrainians rebelling in the east of their country, saying it was clear that special forces troops from Russia were operating there as they did in Crimea before its annexation.

"Remember that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin denied their presence and now he has admitted to their presence in Crimea. The same thing will come out of Ukraine as time rolls out," he told a military and diplomatic audience in Ottawa.

"Exactly what we saw in Crimea is being mirrored in eastern Ukraine," added Breedlove.

Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops on its border with eastern Ukraine, prompting fears that Moscow might send ground forces in to protect the rights of ethnic Russians.

Breedlove said that until a week ago, he thought the most likely military response from Russia would be to send in troops to southern Ukraine and secure a land bridge to the peninsula of Crimea - which voted in March to join Russia - before possibly pushing on toward the Black Sea port of Odessa and then further west toward Moldova.

"Today I would tell you I don't think that's the most likely course of action ... I think now that Putin may be able to accomplish his objectives in eastern Ukraine and never go across the border with his forces," he said.

"Now I think probably the most likely course of action is that he will continue doing what he's doing - discrediting the government, creating unrest, trying to set the stage for a separatist movement," and that would make it easier to cement Moscow's military and economic hold on eastern Ukraine, Breedlove added.

"In that case, I think it's the most troublesome for NATO because if the forces do not come across the border, my guess is that many will want to try to quickly go back to business as usual, and I, for one, do not believe annexing Crimea is business as usual."

In a recent interview for EurActiv, the Czech Foreign Minister Lubomr Zaorlek said that the EU will introduce economic sanctions on Moscow if Russian troops enter Ukraine [read more].

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NATO: Russia can achieve its goals in Ukraine without invading

Opinion: NATO needs to rethink its strategy

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The Ukraine crisis will force the NATO military alliance to rethink its strategy once again. Up to now, NATO has focused on being an army ready for deployment well outside of its member states' regions, such as in the extended conflict in Afghanistan. That approach was evident, in part, when it came to decisions on arms and supplies for European forces: fewer soldiers, fewer heavy combat units, and, instead, highly mobile units that could quickly be sent off to operations in far-off lands.

In the course of this restructuring process, Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr, reduced its artillery and tanks to a minimum and got rid of compulsory military service. In fact, the Bundeswehr now has just one-tenth of the number of tanks it had 25 years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell. In their place came an increased capacity for transportability and other logistical skills. Was that shift too hasty?

Suddenly, the specter of a Russian attack on NATO territory to the east has re-emerged - a scenario that had vanished from public discourse for years. Although defense against such a land attack within NATO allies' territory in Europe has always been viewed as being among the military alliance's actual core tasks, its political leadership had no longer taken the prospect seriously. With Russia, NATO had strived for as strong a partnership-style relationship as possible. We know now that that approach did not work.

Determent back in fashion

Russia's leaders have understood NATO as an anti-Russian alliance since the end of the Cold War. Now, NATO states must once again intensively examine the issue of defense against possible Russian attacks. Counting tanks and gun barrels was long seen as pass - something for those still trapped in the bygone Soviet era. However, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has made mention for weeks now of "deterring" Russian troops, while being able as a military alliance to defend its eastern member states, such as Poland, Romania and the Baltics, from potential attacks.

After Russia's Five-Day War with Georgia in 2008, those in NATO's planning circles considered such scenarios more carefully, but without any pressure from politicians. The US, NATO's most important partner, has also withdrawn massive amounts of weapons and troops from Europe. Meanwhile, Russia has reformed and newly equipped both its conventional as well as its atomic armed forces since 2008. The Russian army at the country's western border is home to a large and swift tank force that can transition from routine maneuvers into actual battle within days. That's according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Philip Breedlove, a US general.

Thinking through the unthinkable

NATO could do little to combat these troops at the moment. Combat brigades would first have to be brought in from the US and Western Europe - to Eastern Europe, Poland or Estonia. NATO's current strategy is to protect its eastern allies with rapid response troops that consists of continuously alternating units from the other member states. But the new reality on the ground will have to be taken into account during a NATO summit in September at the latest. Its defense plans must be quickly re-worked.

US President Barack Obama set the tone during his March visit to Brussels, saying Europeans need to spend more on defense. After all, Russia has raised its defense budget by nearly a third, while European countries have condensed their defense spending for years. After the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is also looking to save on defense. Nonetheless, the US military budget remains 10 times as large as Russia's.

European defense politicians were happy to be able to drastically reduce their spending during the financial crisis. But that now seems to be a thing of the past. Europeans have to recognize that defense will be expensive and will strain budgets in the years ahead.

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Opinion: NATO needs to rethink its strategy

NSA looks to appeal to young cryptographers through coded ads

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THE UNITED STATES National Security Agency (NSA) has posted a Twitter message in which it apparently asked cryptographers if they want to apply to work there.

The NSA, which has been shaken by Edward Snowden's revelations, put up the coded message over the weekend.

It is pretty obviously a coded message, and we wonder what Snowden might make of it. Twitter users have been trying to crack it, and as you see below at least one Youtube walkthrough is already online.

Most of the NSA job adverts, which come from the @NSAcareers account, make sense to any Twitter user.

This one, though, from late yesterday was markedly different. "tpfccdlfdtte pcaccplircdt dklpcfrp?qeiq lhpqlipqeodf gpwafopwprti izxndkiqpkii krirrifcapnc dxkdciqcafmd vkfpcadf. #MissionMonday #NSA #news," it said, cryptically.

Compared to a normal solicitation for job applicants, it looks very strange indeed.

Szymon Machajewski, of Grand Valley State University's School of Computing and Information Systems said that is a "substitution cipher", and worked backwards from an assumption of what code letter best represents the letter "e".

Machajewski used common online tools, a Javascript method, to crack the code. It took less than eight minutes.

Perhaps disappointingly, the code is not actually a job advert, but a message to come back and check out the NSA job listings on a Monday.

"Want to know what it takes to work at the NSA?" it asked. "Check back each Monday in May as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation."

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NSA looks to appeal to young cryptographers through coded ads

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Code Cracked: Mysterious NSA Tweet Is Decrypted in Seconds

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NSA's recruiting office sent out a mystifying tweet Monday morning, prompting observers to question whether perhaps the agency had sent the nonsense message by accident. But on closer inspection, the tweet turned out to be a code designed to lure in would-be cryptographers though by cipher standards, it's a pretty simple one.

The letters below look at first like they could represent anything. But to the eye of a cryptographer, a few things stand out. See if you can spot them.

The period comes at the end, and each "word" is 12 characters long except those with punctuation. This suggests that the spaces are meaningless, only the letters are in code, and the symbols are being used normally.

In addition, simple analysis of the coded text shows that some letters appear more frequently than others, just as in English and other languages. This suggests the code is a simple "substitution cypher," where each letter is changed for another.

This type of cryptogram is among the oldest and simplest, one version of it having been used by none other than Julius Caesar.

Such simple code can be solved by brute force, using a computer tool to try hundreds of different combinations of letter swaps. It only took six seconds for this Web app to figure out the solution, albeit with a minor error. But half an hour's work would have done it, too: The most common letters in the code (P, C and I) are likely the most common letters in English (E, T and A) as indeed they turned out to be. The message is:

"Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each Monday in may as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation."

Not quite as disappointing as "Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine," but still not as exciting as people might have hoped. We'll keep an eye on the NSA's Twitter account to see if future coded messages appear this month.

When contacted for more information, an NSA spokesperson wrote in an email to NBC News that the coded tweet is not in fact the first, and is "part of recruitment efforts to attract the best and the brightest."

First published May 5 2014, 1:10 PM

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Code Cracked: Mysterious NSA Tweet Is Decrypted in Seconds

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Fourth Amendment Defined & Explained – Law

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PREMIUM LEGAL RESOURCES LEGAL FORMS ASK A LAWYER

'The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.'

To pass muster under the Fourth Amendment, detention must be 'reasonable. ' See U.S. v. Montoya de Hernandez, 473 U.S. 531, 542-44 ('85) (analyzing constitutionality of length of traveler's border detention under Fourth Amendment reasonableness standard); Caban, 728 F.2d at 75 (considering whether duration of border detention without a hearing was reasonable).

In the context of a criminal arrest, a detention of longer than 48 hours without a probable cause determination violates the Fourth Amendment as a matter of law in the absence of a demonstrated emergency or other extraordinary circumstance. See County of Riverside v. McLaughlin, 111 S.Ct. 1661, 670 ('91). However, the Supreme Court arrived at this rule by considering the time it takes to complete administrative steps typically incident to arrest. See id.

Unreasonable Searches And Seizures.

Non-consensual extraction of blood implicates Fourth Amendment privacy rights. Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Ass'n, 489 U.S. 602, 16 ('89) ('this physical intrusion, penetrating beneath the skin, infringes [a reasonable] expectation of privacy'); Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, 67 ('66) (compulsory blood test 'plainly involves the broadly conceived reach of a search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment').' '[f]or the Fourth Amendment does not proscribe all searches and seizures, but only those that are unreasonable.' Skinner, 489 U.S. at 619; accord Vernonia School Dist. 47J v. Acton, No. 95-590, 1995 WL 373274, at *3 (June 26,'95) ('the ultimate measure of the constitutionality of a governmental search is `reasonableness''). A search's reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment generally depends on whether the search was made pursuant to a warrant issued upon probable cause. U.S. v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 701 ('83).

Even in the law enforcement context, the State may interfere with an individual's Fourth Amendment interests with less than probable cause and without a warrant if the intrusion is only minimal and is justified by law enforcement purposes. E.g., Michigan State Police Dept v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444, 450 ('90); Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 20 ('68).

The gathering of fingerprint evidence from 'free persons' constitutes a sufficiently significant interference with individual expectations of privacy that law enforcement officials are required to demonstrate that they have probable cause, or at least an articulable suspicion, to believe that the person committed a criminal offense and that the fingerprinting will establish or negate the person's connection to the offense. See Hayes v. Florida, 470 U.S. 811, 813-18 ('85); Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U.S. 721, 726-28 ('69).

Nevertheless, everyday 'booking' procedures routinely require even the merely accused to provide fingerprint identification, regardless of whether investigation of the crime involves fingerprint evidence. See Smith v. U.S., 324 F.2d 879, 882 (D.C. Cir.'63) (Burger, J.) ('it is elementary that a person in lawful custody may be required to submit to . . . fingerprinting . . . as part of the routine identification processes'); Napolitano v. U.S., 340 F.2d 313, 314 (1st Cir.'65) ('Taking fingerprints [prior to bail] is universally standard procedure, and no violation of constitutional rights.'). Thus, in the fingerprinting context, there exists a constitutionally significant distinction between the gathering of fingerprints from free persons to determine their guilt of an unsolved criminal offense and the gathering of fingerprints for identification purposes from persons within the lawful custody of the state.

Although the drawing of blood from free persons generally requires a warrant supported by probable cause to believe that a person has committed a criminal offense and that his blood will reveal evidence relevant to that offense, see Schmerber, 384 U.S. at 768-71; U.S. v. Chapel, ___ F.3d ___, slip op. at 5753-54 (9th Cir.'95) (en banc), the absence of such a warrant does not a fortiori establish a violation of the plaintiffs' Fourth Amendment rights.

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Fourth Amendment Defined & Explained - Law

US Supreme Court refuses to consider gun-rights case

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WASHINGTON - The US Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up a case over whether Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms in public.

It comes amid a rumbling and divisive debate between pro- and anti-gun lobbies after several high-profile shootings or massacres in recent years.

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution gives citizens the right to bear arms, but states have enacted various laws governing gun ownership.

John Drake, who operates an ATM business, was challenging a strict New Jersey state law that requires people wanting to carry a handgun outside the home to demonstrate a "justifiable need."

Backed by the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), Drake argued that his employees need to be able to defend themselves because they are carrying large sums of money.

The NRA said in its argument backing Drake: "The Second Amendment guarantees the right to carry weapons for the purpose of self-defence - not just for self-defence within the home, but for self-defence - period."

It added that the "right to bear arms for self-defence" was "as important outside the home as inside."

In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to possess a gun at home for self-defence.

But in dismissing the complaint, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court of appeal decision stating that the New Jersey law is consistent with the Second Amendment.

It has declined to hear similar challenges to the concealed carry laws of New York and Maryland.

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US Supreme Court refuses to consider gun-rights case