Woo vs. Harmon - Witness Rupert Murdoch

David C. Farmer, Successor-Trustee vs. Harmon

(Formerly Mary Lou Woo vs. Harmon & James B. Nicholson vs. Harmon)

U.S. District Court For the District of Hawaii

—

DEFENDANT’S WITNESS

RUPERT MURDOCH

Media mogul; major shareholder and the Chairman and Managing Director of News Corporation and the Fox Network and Fox News.

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Rupert Murdoch's Jewish origins:
a matter of controversy

ActionReport online

A well placed correspondent with connections to the newspaper world (who has asked to remain anonymous) reports to us:

"I shall quote exactly what Candour [a rightwing British journal edited by A K Chesterton] said in its June 1984 issue (vol. XXXV, no. 6):

BIOGRAPHICAL details of [Rupert] Murdoch's past are sketchy and often contradictory. One reads that his grandfather was an impoverished Presbyterian minister who migrated to Australia from England, that his father was a low-paid reporter for a British newspaper in Australia, and yet, young Rupert divided his time between his family's suburban home near Melbourne and the family's sheep ranch in the country. He was educated first at the fashionable Geelong private school, and went on to the elitist and aristocratic Oxford University in England.

"Rupert's father Sir Keith Murdoch [see below] attained his prominent position in Australian society through a fortuitous marriage to the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family, née Elisabeth Joy Greene. Through his wife's connections, Keith Murdoch was subsequently promoted from reporter to chairman of the British-owned newspaper where he worked. There was enough money to buy himself a knighthood of the British realm, two newspapers in Adelaide, South Australia, and a radio station in a faraway mining town. For some reason, Murdoch has always tried to hide the fact that his pious mother brought him up as a Jew...

And that, as I am sure you know, makes him a Jew according to the law of the Talmud, and indeed according to the present laws of Israel.

Spotlight [a rightwing Washington weekly published by Willis Carto] in fact examined Murdoch in considerable depth in no fewer than three issues, 30th January and 6th and 13th February [1984]. My friend Ivor Benson whom I regarded as a very judicious observer and commentator, reckoned, along with Spotlight, that his meteoric ascent was completely artificial, and that he was a front for far more powerful super-rich subversives, Michel Fribourg, Armand Hammer and Edgar Bronfman, "all of them part of a super-rich 'Zionist Mafia'", to quote Benson, who added: "By comparison with these three, Murdoch is just an ambitious midget who has been given the job of drawing all the public attention away from those who make the real decisions." (Benson's Behind the News, March 1984)

Could well be. Certainly I can confirm that at least part of his meteoric ascent was artificial. I remember my brother-in-law [a former editor of The Times] telling me, at the time of Murdoch's acquisition of The Times, that it was a strange business. Murdoch was by no means the highest bidder.

For my part, I myself have always had good personal motives to take a favourable view of Murdoch, because my brother-in-law was easily his favourite editor of The Times, and, when my brother-in-law died (in office), Murdoch treated my sister completely fairly, from a financial point of view, without making the slightest difficulty. But, despite that reason for some prejudice in his favour, I have always been forced to the judgement that he has been a force for unspeakable evil.

His was the "breakthrough" which made the tabloids genuinely pornographic.

In my opinion at least, his policy with The Times completed its collapse from its position as the most respected newspaper in the world.

And his republicanism makes me sick -- it is not for the purpose of creating a better world, but quite obviously purely destructive. And I could go on.

PS: QUITE recently, a Times correspondent actually resigned because he was not allowed to report properly what was going on in Israel, or even to use accurate words to describe facts which were undisputed. He stated: "Murdoch's executives were so scared of irritating him that, when I pulled off a little scoop by tracking, interviewing and photographing the unit in the Israeli army which killed Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy whose death was captured on film and became the iconic image of the conflict, I was asked to file the piece 'without mentioning the dead kid'. After that conversation, I was left wordless, so I quit." Unusually courageous for a modern journalist...

Related items on this website:

http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/05/Murdoch1.html

http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/05/Murdoch3.html

The papers of Rupert Murdoch's father, Keith (who was married to Elisabeth Greene) are archived at the National Library of Australia

http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/05/Murdoch2.html

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NEW DISCOVERY (05-07-08):

From: Hapa1234@aol.com

Date: Wed, 7 May 2008 05:46:40 EDT

Subject: Check out Rupert Murdoch Firm Goes on Trial for Alleged Tech Sabotage

To: bobby_n_harmon@yahoo.com, jurisnot@yahoo.com, mike@michaelmoore.com, Ken_Conklin@yahoo.com, inform@cnionline.org, editor@educate-yourself.org, stich@unfriendlyskies.com, hwburgess@hawaii.rr.com, Cropdustersal@cs.com

Rupert Murdoch Firm Goes on Trial for Alleged Tech Sabotage

Hey CB / Swampfox / Sicko:

Public Scope: Rupert Murdoch; Corporate Communication Spying; Foreign Intelligence gathering & stolen Inslaw Promis software ; Israeli Foreign Interests to control the U.S. Media Market via Canada?

Aloha Mai Mo. Aloha Aku: Do the facts matter for the public subsidized "Social Engineers in Paradise"?

ninja cats - south pacific chapter {Islands in the Sun for: Hawaii - AIPAC Governor: Linda Lingle / Native American Super Lobbyist: Casino Jack Abramoff / AIPAC's "101st Congressman" - Norman Brownstein}

The Article:

April 21, 2008

Rupert Murdoch Firm Goes on Trial for Alleged Tech Sabotage

By Kim Zetter

Did a Rupert Murdoch company go too far and hire hackers to sabotage rivals and gain the top spot in the global pay-TV war?

This is the question a jury will be facing in a spectacular five-year-old civil lawsuit that is finally being tried this month in California but which has, oddly, received little notice from U.S. media.

The case involves a colorful cast of characters that includes former intelligence agents, Canadian TV pirates, Bulgarian and German hackers, stolen e-mails and the mysterious suicide of a Berlin hacker who had been courted by the Murdoch company not long before his death.

On the hot spot is NDS Group, a UK-Israeli firm that makes smartcards for pay-TV systems like DirecTV. The company is a majority-owned subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corporation. The charges stem from 1997 when NDS is accused of cracking the encryption of rival NagraStar, which makes access cards and systems for EchoStar's Dish Network and other pay-TV services. Further, it’s alleged NDS then hired hackers to manufacture and distribute counterfeit NagraStar cards to pirates to steal Dish Network's programming for free.

NagraStar and one of its parent companies, EchoStar, are seeking about $101 million for damages for piracy, copyright infringement, misconduct and unfair competition. The list of witnesses in the case includes EchoStar's founder and CEO Charlie Ergen; several hackers and pirates; and Reuven Hazak, an Israeli who heads security for NDS and is a former deputy head of Shabak, or Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security agency (the equivalent of Britain's MI5).

The case, which began April 9 in the U.S. District Court's Central Division in Santa Ana, California, could conceivably result in an award of hundreds of millions of dollars, although neither side is expected to emerge unscathed from testimony that threatens to expose the messy underbelly of the high-stakes pay-TV industry.

As if to emphasize this point, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter said after the proceedings began that he was concerned that the case would hinge on testimony from known lawbreakers like hackers and pirates, who have been employed by the companies on both sides of the lawsuit. The judge urged the plaintiffs and defendant to settle rather than face potentially devastating harm to their reputations.

EchoStar wouldn't comment on the case while it's ongoing, but Jim Davis, a senior analyst with the 451 Group, a market research firm, said the company isn't likely to settle.

"It gets taken very personal when your security product has been hacked," he said. "And to have a competitor do that through, allegedly, the services of a known hacker, has got to be particularly galling to NagraStar."

As for NDS, which currently has more than 75 million access cards on the market, Davis says the company probably sees the trial as an opportunity to defend against the image that it is "simultaneously promoting a product that secures networks while working with folks that work outside the law [to break networks]."

The company said in a statement to Wired.com: "We are confident our position will be upheld at a trial."

According to court documents, the scheme began to unravel in 2000 when law-enforcement agents in Texas seized suspicious packages containing CD and DVD players stuffed with more than $40,000 in cash. Parcels similar to this were being sent almost daily from Canada, via Texas, to a hacker in California named Christopher Tarnovsky, who was working for NDS as an engineer. The money was allegedly part of the conspiracy between Tarnovsky and NDS Group to sabotage NagraStar's cards.

As laid out in the allegations, NDS' hacking is said to have begun in 1997 after its own access cards were cracked and it was at risk of losing clients like DirecTV, which was being hit hard from pirates who were selling unfettered access to its system.

But rather than deal with its security breach, NDS hired Tarnovsky and other pirates who had compromised its system to help the company hack and pirate its competitors' cards and even out the playing field, it is alleged.

In addition to Tarnovsky, the company also hired Oliver Kommerling, a hacker known for writing the primer on cracking smartcards. Kommerling has acknowledged in an affidavit that he helped NDS set up a research lab in Haifa, Israel, where NagraStar's smartcard was allegedly cracked by NDS engineers.

NDS didn't hire only hackers, however. According to EchoStar/NagraStar, it also hired a handful of other people with colorful pasts who they say had a role in hacking and pirating EchoStar/NagraStar. There was Reuven Hazak, who had been deputy head of Israel's Shin Bet during the notorious Bus 300 incident (when two Palestinian terrorists who hijacked an Israeli bus were killed in custody by a Shin Bet agent. Hazak eventually blew the whistle on the subsequent cover-up).

NDS also hired a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer named John Norris and a former Scotland Yard commander named Ray Adams. Finally, it hired a former would-be terrorist, Yossi Tsuria, who became chief technical officer of its lab in Israel. Tsuria was part of a radical group of Jewish Israelis in the 1980s that plotted to bomb the Dome of the Rock -- a shrine that sits on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a holy site for both Jews and Muslims.

NDS has maintained in public statements that Hazak, Norris and its other security officers were hired to help it track down hackers and pirates and get them arrested. But EchoStar and NagraStar allege that Hazak and Norris played central roles in committing hacking and piracy as well.

In late 1997, NDS researchers in Israel reportedly cracked the NagraStar card after about six months of effort, using an electron microscope.

NagraStar became aware its card was hacked in late 1998 when meeting with DirecTV to discuss the pay-TV company's desire to switch from the hacked NDS cards to NagraStar's cards. But DirecTV employees surprised NagraStar at the meeting when they informed NagraStar that its cards had also been hacked.

EchoStar/NagraStar claim that NDS, aware that DirecTV was about to abandon its cards in favor of NagraStar cards, cracked NagraStar's card to discourage DirecTV from making the switch.

After NDS cracked its rival's card, Tarnovsky and his associates allegedly created and sold counterfeit NagraStar cards through a piracy site based in Canada, among others, that allowed pirates to access Dish Network programs for free. Tarnovsky is also accused of later posting on the Canadian site the code, secret keys and instructions for hacking the microprocessor on EchoStar's access cards, allowing pirates to flood the market with even more cards. He has denied the allegations. Hazak and Norris are accused of providing Tarnovsky with the code so he could post it online, but NDS maintains this didn't happen.

According to court documents, the sabotage scheme worked remarkably well throughout 1998 and 1999 as counterfeit NagraStar cards flooded the market.

It was around this time, however, that a German hacker in Berlin known as Boris Floricic, aka Tron, disappeared while walking home from his parents' home one day. He was found several days later hanging from a belt in a park.

Among his possessions, authorities found correspondence from NDS. NDS later said it had offered Boris a job, which he had rejected. Prior to his death, Boris had obtained source code and information about hacking access cards that were being used in a German satellite TV system. His friends in the German hacker group, Chaos Computer Club, were convinced that he'd met with foul play.

Although his death was officially ruled a suicide, there were enough details around it to create suspicion. Floricic's feet were on the ground when he was found hanging, for example, and other evidence suggested that his body might have been placed in the park after he died.

During this time, NagraStar wasn't the only alleged victim of NDS hacking and piracy. In 2002, the French pay-TV service Canal Plus filed a damages suit against NDS, from which the EchoStar/NagraStar case emerged. In an affidavit from that case, Kommerling disclosed that NDS had cracked the Canal Plus cards using a method he had taught its engineers in Israel. Then, he revealed, the company instructed Tarnovsky to post the Canal Plus code on the internet.

The Canal Plus suit fizzled after its parent company, Vivendi Universal, struck a business deal with News Corporation that included a condition that Canal Plus would drop its suit against NDS. This is when EchoStar joined the litigation.

Before Canal Plus's case against NDS died, Tarnovsky indicated to the company that Reuven Hazak had given him the Canal Plus code to post it on the internet. He reportedly told the French firm he would testify in the case, but later backed out, citing fear for his life and his family.

In May 2002, two months after Canal Plus filed its suit, someone broke into the car of one of NDS' British employees and stole the hard drive from his laptop, making off with thousands of NDS documents and e-mails. EchoStar/NagraStar say the e-mails provide proof of NDS' hacking and piracy activities. NDS has suggested that the e-mails might be fabricated and has battled to keep them out of the court proceedings.

NDS has denied the lawsuit allegations. The company maintains that it was simply engaging in reverse-engineering, as any company would do to understand rivals and compete in the marketplace, but that it did not distribute cards or information about hacking NagraStar's encryption to pirates.

In an e-mail statement to Wired.com, the company took a dig at its competitor's competence and touted its superior skills.

"The hacking of EchoStar was the result of inferior technology arising from inadequate investment in research and development by [NagraStar]," said the statement. "NDS, on the other hand, invests heavily in research and development ... we reinvested over 30 percent of our revenues into R&D -- and the result is that we have zero piracy and the platforms of our customers are completely secure."

The trial is expected to last at least two more weeks.

David Cassidy/Flickr

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2008/04/murdoch

Catbird: Interesting side-note to this story.... The Lippo Group and Sukamto Sia’s ex-father-in-law, Moshtar Riady, and possibly Sukamto Sia himself, were invested in EchoStar in Indonesia. See: http://alamo-girl.com/0171.htm

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December 4, 2007

Murdoch expands media empire with Beliefnet.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. announced today that it has “acquired Beliefnet, the largest faith and spirituality information site on the Web, for an undisclosed sum.” Murdoch, who also recently bought Dow Jones & Co., will have access to Beliefnet’s roughly “3 million unique visitors each month and a daily email newsletter that reaches nearly 11 million subscribers.”

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September 1, 2006

Rupert Murdoch's Victims

The Life and Crimes of a Global Goebbels

By RICHARD NEVILLE, Counterpunch

The first death known to me, that was precipitated by a Rupert Murdoch headline, occurred in Sydney in March,1964, when a schoolboy committed suicide. More of that later. These days, the casualties resulting from military invasions championed by Murdoch are numbered in the thousands, though he is not the sole agent of destruction. One of his former TV producers in the Middle East, Serene Sabbagh, resigned from Fox recently because of its "bias and racism".

What tipped Sabbagh over the edge was the bombing of Qana. "As a mother of three, watching the images, the raw images of children being pulled out of the rubble and then I switched to Fox News to hear some of their anchors claiming that these little kids that were killed, these innocent victims that were killed, were human shields used by Hezbollah. And one of the anchors went as far as saying they were planted there by Hezbollah to win support in this war. And it was unbelievable. For me, that was the breaking point"

On August 6, Serene Sabbagh and a colleague sent a joint letter of resignation to Fox News: "Not only are you an instrument of the Bush White House, and Israeli propaganda, you are war mongers with no sense of decency, nor professionalism." A verdict which is widely echoed. "Fox News has had reporters running around northern Israel chronicling every rocket attack and every Israeli mobilization, but has shown little or no interest in anything happening on the other side of the border", noted Andrew Gumbel in the UK's Independent.

News Corp had "walked away from professional journalism and crossed over into dutiful propaganda", wrote another analyst, "a dangerous new chapter even for Fox News". The whole organization had shifted beyond warmongering into deep censorship, where it "purposely cordoned off topics of discussion In fact, I could not find a single, authentic, independent expert on Arab politics and history who appeared on Fox News to discuss the roots of the escalating violence. Not one."

In the editorial pages of Murdoch's antipodean flagship, The Australian, the bombing of Beirut is presented as "Israel doing Lebanon a favour" and restive Arabs are described as "Nazis". None of this should be surprising, as Murdoch revealed to the Hollywood Reporter that his media ventures are "not as important to me as spreading my personal political beliefs" (November 23, 2005). And these beliefs are dangerous. Murdoch's influential Weekly Standard advocates the pursuit of "regime change in Syria . and a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"

It does not seem to figure in Murdoch's personal accounting that over half a million civilians are now dead or disfigured as a result of the wars he has already promoted. Instead of reconsidering his politics, like other lapsed neocons, Murdoch is still blazing away with his tools of the trade: hate, lies, fear and censorship.

So here's the nub. In a world facing a series of crises, should an unelected billionaire with a militant agenda and key politicians in the palm of his hand be allowed to preside over a global empire of propaganda? An empire continually expanding, one that gobbles up competitors and is now even blocking free speech on the internet. (See MySpace Is The Trojan Horse Of Internet Censorship)

On top of this, Murdoch's minions reject the inconvenient facts of climate chaos and attack the greens as "a threat to the prosperity and well-being" of the world (The Australian September 2, 2004). Whereas a real threat to the well-being of the world and its people is Rupert Murdoch, as I first discovered long ago.

These days, Murdoch's war-mongering is compulsive and his disregard for human wreckage is both calculated and global; but in the beginning, what marked his output was a casual (and sometimes fatal) disregard for the frailties of humans.

Murdoch's rise to power took off in Sydney in 1964, when he acquired an afternoon tabloid, the Daily Mirror. On March 12, the Mirror front paged a report on "promiscuity" among the pupils of a city high school, which was based on the contents of a young girl's diary. The resulting uproar led to the diarist and a fellow student being expelled from school. A job well done.

That's where the story ended as far the Mirror was concerned, though not for those involved. The 13 year old schoolboy named in the diary, Digby Bamford, was found hanging from his backyard clothesline, having committed suicide. This news was "cordoned off" from public consumption. Even rival papers kept the secret, until a disgruntled Murdoch journalist tipped off an independent magazine.

The author of the "school sex" diary was examined by a doctor from the Child Welfare Department and found to be a virgin. During an interview years later, I reminded Murdoch of this event and his reaction was sharp: "Don't you ever make mistakes?" Of course I do. Many. After acquiring the News of the World in London in 1971, Rupert discovered another diary, while he was campaigning against a popular BBC TV show, Top of the Pops. His paper accused its stars of "promiscuity" with young dancers in the audience. One of these was Samantha MacAlpine, aged 15, whose "leatherette bound book", according Murdoch's news desk, "could well blow wide open the scandal at the BBC". The day after this report, Samantha MacAlpine committed suicide.

The News of the World tried to cover itself with the headline, THIS GIRL WAS A VICTIM NOW SHE IS DEAD, but the coroner stated that Samantha's diary was "pure fantasy. unconnected with reality", (like much Murdoch journalism). A Scotland Yard officer accused the paper of being "ludicrous and irresponsible". As is the Murdoch style, the evidence from the inquest was kept from the readers. Also suppressed was the statement of the forensic pathologist, that in his opinion, Samantha had died a virgin.

Two weeks ago, when young Australian Jack Thomas appealed his conviction for receiving funds from Al Qaeda and holding a false passport, he was acquitted by the Victorian Court of Appeal.

FURY AFTER JIHAD JACK WALKS FREE, headlined The Australian, although the fury was largely confined to Murdoch's newsroom. A jury had previously acquitted Jack Thomas of two more substantial matters. The Victorian Court quashed his conviction on the lesser charges, because police statements had been taken from the defendant while he was incarcerated in Pakistan without access to a lawyer and subjected to assaults. (A US interrogator told Thomas he would crush his testicles, rape his wife and put her breasts in a vice).

When the Appeal judges freed Thomas, as they were obliged to do under Australian law, the Murdoch media called for public outrage and demanded "rapid amendments to ensure that no judge can make the same mistake". One of the first steps in the Third Reich's campaign to win over the hearts and minds of the German people was to attack the judges. Another step was to consolidate the media. A third step was to fan the flames of fear.

In response to criticism of its assault on the judiciary, The Australian hit back: 'what will it take to get Mr Thomas's apologists to take the terror threat seriously? Suicide bombers detonating aboard Melbourne's trams? A USS Cole-style strike on the Manly ferry?" And sure enough, as I write, another Murdoch missile hits the front page. SYDNEY WILL BE ATTACKED.

After interviewing 572 citizens, the Daily Telegraph has decided that "most Australians believe we are locked in a losing war against Islamic terrorists and an attack on our home soil is inevitable". The number who cite Murdoch's compulsive belligerence as a factor in the escalation of terror is not revealed.

On the same day, Jack "Jihad" Thomas is arrested on the beach, slapped with a newly introduced "control order" and ordered home, where his movements are to be restricted. Questioning voices are merely a "civil libertarian lobby that believes John Howard is a greater threat to our way of life than bin Laden", according to MurdochWorld.

No, the greatest threat is the control of information from the top. "Fascism ought to more properly be called corporatism", said Mussolini, "since it is the merger of state and corporate power."

Beware the global Goebbels.

Richard Neville has been around a while. He lives in Australia, the land that formed him. In the Sixties he raised hell in London and published Oz. He can be reached through his very bracing website, http://www.richardneville.com.au/

http://www.counterpunch.org/neville09012006.html

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NEW DISCOVERY (05-04-08): David Farmer’s undisclosed connections with AIPAC, Linda Lingle and Barack Obama:

April 1, 2008

Murdoch’s Daughter Hosts
Obama Fund-Raiser

By Michael Luo

Insert a new twist to the political parlor game that involves following the moves of Rupert Murdoch and his clan: his daughter, Elisabeth, is hosting at her London home a fund-raiser for Senator Barack Obama.

Ms. Murdoch is one of a slew of “event chairs,” which also includes Gwyneth Paltrow, for the April 28 event at Ms. Murdoch’s home in Notting Hill. David Blood, who runs an investment fund with former Vice President Al Gore that specializes in environmentally-friendly companies, is also listed as an “event host.”

A contribution of $2,300 offers access to the V.I.P. reception; attendance to the main event only requires a $1,000 donation.

Mr. Murdoch, of course, is chairman of the News Corporation, which includes under its umbrella Fox News and the New York Post. Mr. Murdoch had a much-discussed rapprochement with Mrs. Clinton two years ago, when the Post endorsed Mrs. Clinton in her Senate campaign and he held a fund-raiser for her. Last year, he even contributed $2,300 to her presidential campaign.

But the Post endorsed Mr. Obama just before the crush of states that voted on Feb. 5 in a bruising editorial that excoriated Mrs. Clinton, causing media observers to declare that the honeymoon was over for this political odd couple.

Ms. Murdoch, 39, is Mr. Murdoch’s second daughter, one of three children from Mr. Murdoch’s second marriage, who as a group represent the locus of where the betting over who might succeed him has centered.

She holds dual citizenship in the United States and Britain and left British Sky Broadcasting, in which News Corporation is a major investor and she was managing director of Sky Networks, in 2000 to start her own media company, Shine Ltd. She is married to Matthew Freud—great-grandson of Sigmund Freud—a prominent public relations executive in London.

Reached on his boat floating in the Tobago Cays today, Mr. Freud said not much should be read into his wife’s role as a host.

“I don’t think you can interpret the event as anything other than she is enthusiastic about Obama’s campaign,” Mr. Freud said.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/

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Rupert Murdoch is expected to testify regarding his business, professional and personal relationships with Robert Kihune, Albert Hee, Sandwich Isles Communications, Summit Communications, Federal Communications Commission, Colin Powell, Michael Powell, Joe Moore, Henry Kissinger, Sukamto Sia, Indostar, Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin, Citigroup, Henry “Hank” Greenberg, American International Group, Chubb Group, Marsh & McLennan, Asia Society, Carlyle Group, AIPAC, Linda Lingle, Barack Obama, David Farmer, and others to be named upon discovery.

Internet References: