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ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Last week, President George W. Bushs torture regime reared its head in an unusual argument before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 2002, Abu Zubaydah was captured by a militia in Pakistan and handed over to the CIA, which brought him to Poland. Under the supervision of CIA agents and American psychologists, he was brutally tortured until his removal to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba in 2006.

The Bush administration argued Mr. Zubaydah was a high-ranking member of al-Qaida who possessed information needed to fight the war on terror. After his torture produced no actionable information, the CIA told the Department of Justice and the Senate that Mr. Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaida. It had no evidence of wrongdoing by him.

His lawyers filed a criminal complaint with the European Court of Human Rights against the CIA, its psychologists, and the Polish intelligence agents who carried out the torture.

That court concluded that the torture occurred, and it referred to Polish prosecutors to proceed criminally against the defendants. During that criminal proceeding, Polish prosecutors asked the DOJ for the names of those who tortured Mr. Zubaydah and documentation of what they did to him.

In the Supreme Court last week, the governments lawyer conceded that the names of the torturers and the nature of their horrible deeds are already known the psychologists wrote a book about it but the government will not confirm any of it because it constitutes state secrets.

So, if these so-called secrets are now publicly known, why does the government refuse to confirm them?

Here is the backstory.

On Oct. 6, 1948, a U.S. government plane was leaving from Robins Air Force Base in Warner Robins, Georgia, for a round-trip flight to Orlando, Florida, when it crashed, killing its crew. When surviving family members sued the government to determine who manufactured the plane and why it crashed, the feds declined to provide any information asserting that what was sought constituted state secrets.

In 1953, when the Supreme Court upheld this novel argument, it effectively changed the rules of evidence by permitting the federal government without disclosing to a judge what the secrets are to withhold evidence merely by making this claim.

Since 1953, the government has successfully asserted the state secrets claim dozens of times, claiming that the revelation of the so-called secrets will adversely affect national security.

In 2001, after the statute of limitations had long expired for any litigation over the 1948 crash, and reporters filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the alleged state secrets, a judge ordered the government to reveal them.

There were none.

The entire state secrets doctrine was based on covering up government embarrassment and wrongdoing, not the retention of legitimate secrets.

Now, back to the Zubaydah case in which he subpoenaed the DOJ for the records of his torture. Everyone involved in the oral argument knew that the state secrets doctrine was based on material misrepresentations the feds made to at least a dozen federal judges. Yet, the government treated it as if it were legitimate and compelling. The government argued that in wartime, its powers to keep its behavior secret are enhanced.

When Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked what war the U.S. is currently fighting that underlies its state secrets claim, the DOJ lawyer answered that the U.S. is still at war in Afghanistan!

The governments argument that the U.S. is still at war in Afghanistan this must be news to President Joseph R. Biden is, of course, absurd. Yet its cavalier assertion raises serious constitutional questions about war, torture, and secrets.

The state secrets doctrine is a fraud and used by the feds to cover up embarrassments and unlawful behavior for 68 years. And its employment by federal judges who have declined to require that the government produce the secrets for a judicial examination in secret so the courts can determine if these secrets exist and if their revelation would harm national security is a craven rejection of a core judicial function.

That function assures that trials are fair and their outcome is based on evidence, not deception.

The claim that somehow the existence of war in this case, a war that the whole world, except one federal prosecutor, knows is over somehow justifies the detention without charges of a person as to whom the government has no evidence of wrongdoing, and that somehow war justifies torture, and that somehow all of this can be kept secret are claims that violate the Constitution and the federal anti-torture statutes that all who work for the government have sworn to uphold.

The Fifth Amendment guarantees Mr. Zubaydah due process, and the First Amendment guarantees transparency.

The government does not want to confront this. That Mr. Zubaydah was tortured for four years before the CIA and its Polish collaborators concluded that he was truthful demonstrates the reality of the governments resort to illegal and medieval means to gather facts and that torture as a means to the truth is useless and ruinous.

For all we know, Mr. Bush pardoned the psychologists and CIA agents who monitored the torture, but he could not pardon the Polish agents whose names and methods may soon be revealed.

At the end of the oral argument, Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the DOJ lawyer why the DOJ doesnt permit Mr. Zubaydah to testify in the Polish proceedings. The same lawyer who had just told Justice Kavanaugh that the U.S. is still fighting in Afghanistan had no answer.

The government undermines the Constitution when it lies and when it tortures. What kind of society enforces criminal laws against harmless drug users but not against harmful government torturers?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is an analyst for the Fox News Channel. He has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution.

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Lies and torture cover-up: U.S. state secrets doctrine is a fraud - Washington Times

KINGSTON, R.I. Oct. 12, 2021 University of California, Berkeley Professor Umesh Vazirani, a pioneer in quantum computing algorithms and complexity theory, will deliver the annual University of Rhode Island Cruickshank Lecture on Monday, Oct. 18, in conjunction with the three-day Frontiers in Quantum Computing conference.

Frontiers in Quantum Computing, which celebrates the launch this semester of URIs new masters degree in quantum computing, will take place Oct. 18-20 on the Kingston Campus. More than 30 experts in the fields of quantum computing and quantum information science will deliver daily talks on such topics as the future of quantum computing, research and industry developments, and educational initiatives for the next generation of experts in the field.

This will be an impressive gathering, said Vanita Srinivasa, director of URIs Quantum Information Science program and a conference organizer. These scientists have made seminal contributions to quantum computing and quantum information science. We have speakers who are well-established in quantum information science, even before it was a major field, and we have speakers who are up and coming and are now among the top researchers in their fields.

Vazirani, the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center, is considered one of the founders of the field of quantum computing. His talk will explore quantum computings impact on the foundations of quantum mechanics and the philosophy of science.

There are several different theories about how quantum mechanics can be interpreted. Advances in quantum computing will change our understanding of the foundations of quantum mechanics and maybe our overall view of the universe, said Leonard Kahn, chair of the URIDepartment of Physicswho helped organize the conference.

Vaziranis virtual talk, A Quantum Wave in Computing, will be presented to an in-person audience in room 100 of the Beaupre Center for Chemical and Forensic Sciences, 140 Flagg Road, on the Kingston campus, at 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 18. The lecture can also be viewed live with a link from the conferenceswebsite.

The conferences list of speakers includes U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, who will deliver an address at 9:45 am. on the opening day of the conference, along with experts from around the U.S. as well as Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Denmark.

Jacob Taylor, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Joint Quantum Institute Fellow, and founder of the national effort overseeing implementation of the National Quantum Initiative Act, will deliver the conferences opening keynote address on Monday, Oct. 18, at 8 a.m. in the Ballroom of the Memorial Union.

Charles Tahan, assistant director for Quantum Information Science and director of the National Quantum Coordination Office in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OTSP), will give the keynote address before the roundtable discussion on the future of quantum computing on Tuesday, Oct. 19, at 5:15 p.m. in the ballroom, which is sponsored by D-Wave.

The panel will include Taylor, the first assistant director for Quantum Information Science at the OSTP; Michelle Simmons, a pioneer in atomic electronics and silicon-based quantum computing and director of the Australian Research Councils Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology; Catherine McGeoch, Senior Scientist with D-Wave; and Christopher Lirakis, IBM Quantum Lead For Quantum Systems Deployment.

The panelists will provide their perspectives on the future of quantum computing from industry, government and academia, said Srinivasa. The future is uncertain, but hopeful, and there are exciting challenges along the way. Quantum computing technology has progressed from something thats been a dream to something that can actually be built.

Quantum computers have the promise of solving key problems that would take a prohibitively long time to execute on classical computers. Because of the nature of the quantum bit, as compared to the classical bit, some of those intractable calculations can be done on a quantum computer in minutes rather than thousands of years. The impact on many problems from molecular simulations to encryption of credit card data will have far-reaching consequences.

I dont think theres been a time when theres been this much publicity and press about quantum computing, said Kahn. Theres clearly a path forward but there are a lot of hurdles along the way.

With the conference celebrating URIs masters in quantum computing, education will be an important topic. Daily speakers will explore education initiatives, including developing curriculum at all levels to make the field more accessible to students. Presentations will include Chandralekha Singh, president of the American Association of Physics Teachers; Charles Robinson, IBM Quantum Computing Public Sector leader; and Robert Joynt, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Other topics include implementation of quantum computing and industry developments, including talks by Christopher Savoie 92, founder and chief executive officer of Zapata Computing and a conference organizer, and Andrew King, director of Performance Research at D-Wave.

Its going to be amazing science that will be talked about at the conference, said Srinivasa, whose research focuses on quantum information processing theory for semiconductor systems. Christopher Savoie has commented that this conference is equivalent to any of the major conferences on quantum computing that hes been to.

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Frontiers in Quantum Computing is free and open to the public. Except for the Cruickshank Lecture, all events will be held in the Memorial Union Ballroom, 50 Lower College Road, on the Kingston Campus. While events are in-person, some speakers will take part virtually. All sessions can also be viewed online. For more information or to take part, go to the conferenceswebsite.

The conference is sponsored by Zapata Computing, D-Wave, IBM Quantum, PSSC Labs, and Microway, along with URIs College of Arts and Sciences, University Libraries, Information Technology Services, the Office of the Provost, and the Department of Physics.

The Alexander M. Cruickshank Endowed Lectureship was established in 1999. It is named for Alexander M. Cruickshank, who served on the URI chemistry faculty for 30 years and was subsequently the director of the Gordon Research Conferences until his retirement in 1993. The lecture series is sponsored by the URI Department of Physics, the Gordon Research Center and URIs College of Arts and Sciences.

For more information, contact Leonard Kahn atlenkahn@uri.edu.

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Quantum computing pioneer Umesh Vazirani to give Cruickshank Lecture as part of three-day conference - EurekAlert

The stock price of IonQ Inc (NYSE: IONQ) increased by over 3.6% during intraday trading today. Investors are responding positively to researchers from The University of Maryland and IonQ (a leader in trapped-ion quantum computing) publishing results in the journal Nature that show a significant breakthrough in error correction technology for quantum computers.

In collaboration with scientists from Duke University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, this work demonstrated for the first time how quantum computers can overcome quantum computing errors, a key technical obstacle to large-scale use cases like financial market prediction or drug discovery.

Currently, quantum computers suffer from errors when qubits encounter environmental interference. And quantum error correction works by combining multiple qubits together to form a logical qubit that more securely stores quantum information.

But storing information by itself is not enough. Quantum algorithms also need to access and manipulate the information. And to interact with information in a logical qubit without creating more errors, the logical qubit needs to be fault-tolerant.

The study (completed at the University of Maryland, peer-reviewed, and published in the journalNature) demonstrates how trapped ion systems like IonQs can soon deploy fault-tolerant logical qubits to overcome the problem of error correction at scale. And by successfully creating the first fault-tolerant logical qubit a qubit that is resilient to a failure in any one component the team has laid the foundation for quantum computers that are both reliable and large enough for practical uses such as risk modeling or shipping route optimization.

The team had demonstrated that this could be achieved with minimal overhead, requiring only nine physical qubits to encode one logical qubit. And this will allow IonQ to apply error correction only when needed, in the amount needed, while minimizing qubit cost.

Behind the study are recently graduated UMD PhD students and current IonQ quantum engineers Laird Egan and Daiwei Zhu, IonQ cofounder Chris Monroe as well as IonQ technical advisor and Duke Professor Ken Brown. And coauthors of the paper include: UMD and Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) research scientist Marko Cetina; postdoctoral researcher Crystal Noel; graduate students Andrew Risinger and Debopriyo Biswas; Duke University graduate student Dripto M. Debroy and postdoctoral researcher Michael Newman; and Georgia Institute of Technology graduate student Muyuan Li.

This news follows on the heels of other significant technological developments from IonQ. And the company recently demonstrated the industrys first Reconfigurable Multicore Quantum Architecture (RMQA) technology, which can dynamically configure 4 chains of 16 ions into quantum computing cores.

And the company also recently debuted patent-pending evaporated glass traps: technology that lays the foundation for continual improvements to IonQs hardware and supports a significant increase in the number of ions that can be trapped in IonQs quantum computers. It recently became the first quantum computer company whose systems are available for use via all major cloud providers. IonQ also recently became the first publicly-traded, pure-play quantum computing company.

KEY QUOTES:

This is about significantly reducing the overhead in computational power that is typically required for error correction in quantum computers. If a computer spends all its time and power correcting errors, thats not a useful computer. What this paper shows is how the trapped ion approach used in IonQ systems can leapfrog others to fault tolerance by taking small, unreliable parts and turning them into a very reliable device. Competitors are likely to need orders of magnitude more qubits to achieve similar error correction results.

Peter Chapman, President and CEO of IonQ

Disclaimer: This content is intended for informational purposes. Before making any investment, you should do your own analysis.

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IONQ Stock: Why It Increased Today - Pulse 2.0

Ten years after the Mariel Boatlift brought more than 125,000 Cuban immigrants to Florida, an economist named David Card wrote about the immigrant influx and its impact on Miamis labor market.

Card determined there was virtually no effect on wages and jobless rates of the citys less skilled workers. Three years after those conclusions, Cards work on immigration as well as other research on hot-button topics like minimum wage have landed him the honor of a 2021 Nobel Prize in economics.

His studies from the early 1990s challenged conventional wisdom, leading to new analyses and additional insights, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. The other award recipients were Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens from Stanford University.

Its often difficult to see the immediate implications of research, Card said in a press conference held hours after learning he was one of three people receiving the prominent prize.

But for some who focus on big-picture questions of immigration and economic competitiveness, the impact of Cards research at the University of California, Berkeley, and previously at the University of Chicago and Princeton University is clear to see, even as the debate over immigration reform continues.

He was the rock from which we all started, according to Jeremy Robbins, executive director of New American Economy. The organization founded 11 years ago by Michael Bloomberg, the data-driven former New York City mayor focuses on the ways to grow local economies that meld immigration reform and access for people coming to America.

Immigrants or their children founded 40% of Fortune 500 companies, according to New American Economys first report.

When New American Economy works with local leaders in places where new immigrants are arriving, Robbins said they start with scrutiny of the facts on the ground. The first thing we always do, we show who is there, where they work. In the same insight of David Card, you have to show with data what impact immigrants are having in the communities where they are living.

In the same insight of David Card, you have to show with data what impact immigrants are having in the communities where they are living.

Cards impact has been enormous, according to Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. He really does show the cost of immigration has been systemically exaggerated over the years and decades.

But still immigration debates continue and thats because, Nowrasteh said, people dont know or care about what the actual research says and they rely on stereotypes or anecdotes. There are other other academic methods to show larger immigrant impacts on wages, but Cards formulas and approaches, Nowrasteh said, set the real standard.

People seem to want to choose the messages that confirm their opinion, he said.

Cards academic recognition on immigration topics stems back to the Mariel Boatlift, which unfolded between April and October of 1980. Fidel Castro allowed Cubans who wanted to flee his repressive regime to exit via the port of Mariel. Approximately 125,000 people fled.

The events were just the type of natural experiments Card searched for. In a 1990 paper for Industrial and Labor Review, he said Miamis labor force jumped 7%, but that growth showed virtually no effect on the wage rates of less skilled non-Cuban workers.

Card observed Miamis job market had been absorbing immigrants into its unskilled labor force from Cuba, Nicaragua and elsewhere long before the boatlift, and the local economy was well suited for the situation with its textile and apparel industries.

The [immigration] debate isnt about facts anymore. Its about a bunch of feelings. That is something statistics cant explain.

Other data-driven studies followed, hitting on the money angle of immigration and challenging the idea that immigrants cut into the job prospects of people already situated in a labor market.

Hes focused on other labor-market topics, including the effect on gender preferences in job listings.

At Mondays press conference, Card said his research and the research of fellow economists are inputs to an understanding of a complex matter. The kinds of knowledge we can bring are not necessarily the whole story, he said.

However, Card said, it would be helpful if lawmakers could evaluate evidence on topics like minimum-wage levels and immigration policies from a scientific view and not from an ideological view but hes not particularly optimistic.

Last month, the Senates parliamentarian, whose role is nonpartisan, said Democrats could not include a pathway to citizenship in a reconciliation bill geared toward improving the social safety net. At the time, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said leaders would be holding future meetings with the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough. (Bills passed via the budget reconciliation process require only a Senate majority, rather than a filibuster-proof 60 votes, but have to meet standards as interpreted by the parliamentarian.)

Like Card, Nowrasteh doesnt express optimism that change to immigration laws will come swiftly in Washington, D.C. The debate isnt about facts anymore, said Nowrasteh. Its about a bunch of feelings. That is something statistics cant explain.

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'He was the rock from which we all started': How Nobel Prize winner David Card influenced thinking on immigration and jobs - MarketWatch

NSA released the Cybersecurity Information Sheet,Avoid Dangers of Wildcard TLS Certificates and the ALPACA Techniquetoday, warning network administrators about the risks of using poorly scoped wildcard Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates. NSA recommends several actions web administrators should take to keep their servers secure. This guidance also outlines the risks of falling victim to a web application exploitation method called Application Layer Protocols Allowing Cross-Protocol Attacks (ALPACA), which malicious cyber actors can use to access sensitive information.

NSA is releasing this guidance as part of our mission to help secure the Department of Defense (DoD), National Security Systems (NSS) and Defense Industrial Base (DIB). Administrators should assess their environments and mitigate wildcard certificates and ALPACA risks.

Wildcard certificates are used to authenticate multiple servers and simplify credential management, saving time and money. However, if one server hosting a wildcard certificate is compromised, all other servers that can be represented by the wildcard certificate are put at risk. A malicious cyber actor with a wildcard certificates private key can impersonate any of the sites within the certificates scope and gain access to user credentials and protected information.

The ALPACA technique, which exploits hardened web applications through non-HTTP services secured using a TLS certificate whose scope matches the web application, further increases the risk of using poorly scoped wildcard certificates.

NSA recommends NSS, DoD, and DIB administrators ensure their organizations wildcard certificate usage does not create unmitigated risks, making their web servers vulnerable to ALPACA techniques. The Cybersecurity Information Sheet provides mitigations for poorly implemented certificates and ALPACA, including:

For more details on how to harden wildcard certificates against the ALPACA technique,read the full information sheet.

For additional cybersecurity guidance, visithttps://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Cybersecurity-Advisories-Guidance/.

Read more at NSA

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NSA: Avoid Dangers of Wildcard TLS Certificates, the ALPACA Technique - Hstoday - HSToday