Have you ever wondered if your significant other or spouse is cheating and been tempted to play sleuth? People have been catching their spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends cheating for centuries, but it took some real effort. Nowadays, it has become so easy due to technology.

Thirty-three percent of dating couples and 37 percent of spouses — slightly more women than men — say they have checked their partner’s email or call history on the sly, according to a survey last year by the gadget shopping site Retrevo.com, which queried more than 1,000 people online. Among those under 25, almost half reported snooping. Just 9 percent discovered evidence of cheating.

Retrevo.com spokeswoman Jennifer Jacobson said she doesn’t think young couples are less trusting. “It’s just that technology has made everyone’s communications highly accessible and people probably don’t see it as a violation of trust, because of how easy it is to do.”

When Patricia Masterson’s boyfriend broke into her email account in search of evidence that she had been cheating, she was deeply offended by the violation of her privacy. The fact that she had, indeed, been cheating hardly seemed like a good excuse.

She changed her tune 10 years later, when, married and pregnant, Masterson innocently spotted a text message on her husband’s cellphone from a woman regarding a baby. Her husband said it must have been sent to him by mistake, and Masterson, sensitive to privacy, left it alone — until a few months later, when the woman contacted Masterson through Facebook to reveal she’d recently given birth to her husband’s child.

Masterson said, “I became a snooper.” She poured through cellphone records and installed software to recover deleted emails, gathering all the details she could. “It was so not me; up until that point I had believed in absolute privacy.”

When, if ever, is it OK to invade a romantic partner’s privacy? Many say it’s often the only way to confirm suspicions of infidelity when all else fails. I am not sure what “all else” includes – asking and hoping for an honest answer? Hiding behind closed doors and eavesdropping on phone conversations? Following your partner? Hiring a private detective to perform surveillance on your partner? Place a GPS tracker on their car?

According to a study, it depends on from which generation you belong that determines your probability of using today’s technology to spy on your partner.

Larry Rosen, author of “iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us” (Palgrave Macmillan), said millennials raised on a culture of Facebook stalking view privacy differently from baby boomers or Gen-Xers (roughly people over 35).

“For older people, the lines are clear: Private is private, public is public,” said Rosen, a research psychologist and professor at California State University at Dominguez Hills. “For younger people it’s much more murky.”

Flirting with Fire

Technology has made it easier to spy, but it has also made it easier to cheat, blurring the lines of what is considered appropriate relationships. Let’s take Facebook for example. I know of a few couples that broke up over Facebook “friendships.” Facebook invites flirting with exes, and some people never know whom their partner is texting. Is that OK? It depends on the couple, but it can get out of hand.

The ping of a saucy text message stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers, as does cocaine, and people want more, Rosen said.

He recommends people abide by a five-minute “e-waiting period” before sending an electronic communication so that they can be more clear-headed about whether it’s a good idea. I think that’s always a good policy anyway – especially if you are about to send an angry email. You should avoid that impulse to hit the “send” button before giving yourself time to think clearly.

“It’s an issue of higher-level thinking versus lower-order responding,” Rosen said. “We have turned into salivating dogs, and we have to back off a bit.”

Generally, a relationship is harmful if you’re redirecting intimacies and energies from your partner to someone else, or if you’re hiding behavior because you know it would make your partner uncomfortable.

“People are trying to hang on to two worlds, and it’s been my experience that those things blow up,” said Randi Gunther, an LA-based clinical psychologist and marriage counselor, and author of “Relationship Saboteurs” (New Harbinger). “Do you want to spend your life looking over your shoulder?”

I am in complete agreement on this one. You can be cheating on your partner without having any physical contact with another person. There have been numerous studies that show women are more threatened if their partner is having an emotionally intimate relationship with another woman than if he were sleeping with her – not that the latter is very comforting. The exact opposite holds true of men. They are more upset about the physical contact than about their woman seeking emotional support from another man.

Setting Parameters

It’s up to each couple to determine what’s appropriate regarding privacy, but the problem is that most couples don’t talk about their values until someone gets hurt, said Linda Young, a counseling psychologist who sits on the board of the Council on Contemporary Families. Young said couples should get on the same page about their expectations (What is cheating? How transparent should you be? Do you have access to each other’s passwords?) just as they would about children or finances.

But first, she added, it’s important to understand why you desire a certain level of privacy or transparency.

It’s unfair to project insecurities or baggage from prior betrayals onto an innocent partner and go searching for faults, Young said. Innocuous material can easily be misinterpreted and hyper-vigilance can be controlling and push someone away.

Read article@ chicagotribune

In December, Wikileaks revealed what it has dubbed “the Spy Files,” a collection of 287 documents that include information about companies that provide different types of surveillance methods including cell phone forensics, spyware, and Wifi interceptions.

“Over a year or longer, SSL certificates have been penetrated by various organized crime groups and intelligence agencies. The entire SSL system, which is the mechanism that guarantees security and anonymity online, has been compromised. SSL is beyond repair,” says Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The ACLU also has listed a very detailed account of what they consider illegal domestic spying in America. “The FBI, federal intelligence agencies, the military, state and local police, private companies, and even firemen and emergency medical technicians are gathering incredible amounts of personal information about ordinary Americans that can be used to construct vast dossiers that can be widely shared with a simple mouse-click through new institutions like Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, and public-private partnerships. The fear of terrorism has led to a new era of overzealous police intelligence activity directed, as in the past, against political activists, racial and religious minorities, and immigrants.”

Read story@ dfinews

Hezbollah made the names public in a broadcast Friday night on a Lebanese television station, al-Manar. The station used animated videos simulating meetings purported to have taken place between CIA officers and paid informants at Starbucks and Pizza Hut.

So how did Hezbollah crack the identities of these covert operatives? Just like right out of an old Cold War movie – they ran a double agent against the CIA according to former and current U.S. intelligence officials who wished to remain anonymous.

In June, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah bragged that his group had identified at least two spies working for the CIA. It is not clear whether one of those spies was, in fact, the same double agent working for Hezbollah, which is considered a terrorist group by the U.S. It is reported that Nasrallah has referred to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut as a ”den of spies.”

This blunder occurred despite top CIA officials being warned to be extra careful when handling informants after Hezbollah and Lebanese officials arrested scores of Israeli spies in 2009. It isn’t easy sorting out the good spies from the bad spies.

The outing of the officers is particularly damaging because it will hinder the ability of these CIA employees to work overseas again — especially in the Internet age where references to their names will be widely available to other foreign intelligence agencies. Recruiting and training new spies takes some time.

Now, it’s possible none of this is true. The CIA dismissed Hezbollah’s assertions. “The agency does not, as a rule, address spurious claims from terrorist groups,” CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said. “I think it’s worth remembering that Hezbollah is a dangerous organization, with al-Manar as its propaganda arm. That fact alone should cast some doubt on the credibility of the group’s claims.” Good point, still, it makes you wonder. One would expect such a public statement from the CIA denying these allegations.

Former officials said one of the named officers was considered a rising star at the CIA and had been involved in many important operations in Iraq. Whether or not this employee would be able to continue a CIA career outside the U.S. is unknown. Former officials said it is likely Hezbollah has already shared photographs of the case officers with Iran, its closest ally.

It was not immediately clear whether the exposed CIA officers in Lebanon have been pulled out of the country. The Associated Press is not publishing the names of the officers because they could refer to operatives who remain undercover. Now that’s responsible “non-reporting” by the AP – unlike the reporters and news stations that leaked the names of the operatives who killed Osama Bin Laden just to get a story.

Revealing the identities of CIA officers has happened in other cases. A recent incident occurred about one year ago when the name of the CIA’s Pakistan station chief was leaked to reporters there. The CIA initially let him stay but eventually decided it was too dangerous for him to remain in the country.

Case officers did get a bit sloppy by meeting with informants at locations more than once, a practice frowned upon because it risks their exposure.

The disclosure indicates that Hezbollah is sending a sharp message to the CIA to stay out of Lebanon, suggesting that it could have captured the CIA officers at any time since it knew their identities. In 1984, Hezbollah kidnapped the CIA station chief in Beirut. He was tortured and later killed.

Al-Manar said the CIA team in Lebanon consisted of ten officers and all used diplomat cover. The station said their jobs were to oversee intelligence networks in Lebanon.

Read entire story@ yahoo

Lobatos and his wife, Belen Luna Lobatos, have both entered guilty pleas, after being indicted by a grand jury, in what appears to have been over a year long workers’ compensation scam. The couple live in Aurora, Denver. They are accused of stealing $120,000 worth of workers’ compensation funds from Pinnacol Assurance. Eventually, a private investigator was hired and Lobatos was placed under surveillance. However, before this happened, Martin Lobatos led doctors and the insurance company down a road of twists and turns.

Martin was working as a roofer. On September 29, 2008, he fell six to ten feet from a ladder, face first, causing him to briefly lose consciousness — although that’s in dispute. He was taken to Vail Valley Medical Center, where he was diagnosed with a wrist fracture, two broken ribs and a closed head injury that caused a small abrasion and some swelling. A CT scan on his head and neck came back negative, and he was discharged from the medical center the same day he was admitted.

Lobatos filed a workers’ comp claim on September 30. After returning to work full-time on October 21, he began complaining of headaches, dizziness, vertigo, and blurred vision. An MRI on October 28 didn’t show any reason for these symptoms, but he claimed that they persisted. A doctor who examined him in April 2009 couldn’t find any medical reason for his continuing issues. This doctor determined that Lobatos had reached maximum medical improvement (MMI) and assigning him what the indictment describes as a “zero-percent impairment rating.”

Lobatos was terminated from his job that same month (April) and subsequent to him declining to accept a $20,000 settlement from Pinnacol Assurance in September 2009, Lobatos started to complain of new symptoms, including dizziness, memory loss, difficulty recognizing his own children, inability to use stairs without help, pain caused by eating, chewing, bright lights, and the weather. Lobatos was quite convincing and a second physician rejected his predecessor’s findings, determining that the MMI ruling was premature.

In October, Martin, accompanied by his wife, began seeing a medical professional of their choice, Dr. Edwin Healey, and the list of maladies expanded again to include personality changes, inability to drive and suicidal thoughts. Healey determined that his patient was “totally and permanently disabled,” and Martin did his best to prove it. By March 2010, he presented himself as being catatonic. He was immobile and unresponsive behind a pair of dark glasses, only occasionally rousing himself to offer guttural sounds and random body movements.

Pinnacol Insurance agreed to pay the Lobatos $4,000 per month for in-home care, supplemented by thousands more in total temporary disability payments. However, in December 2009, before and after doctor appointments where he outlined disabling issues, he took and passed a driver’s test – both the written exam and eye test.

In February 2011, he was placed under surveillance. He was seen visiting a transmission repair shop, a ranch supply store, a Wal-Mart, a western wear store, a food store, a restaurant, and a church. He was also spotted in his backyard overseeing the construction of a shed.

The surveillance videos of these activities were shown to Belen following two more appointments in which she continued to insist that Martin remained in a nearly vegetative state. According to the indictment, she claimed that he had good days and bad days — and admitted skipping over the good ones.

Martin has now pleaded guilty to theft and making a false statement on a workers’ comp claim — violations that could earn him up to a $750,000 fine and as many as twelve years in prison for the theft charge alone. Belen entered a guilty plea regarding theft and a false workers’ comp statement and could face a maximum $500,000 fine and six years behind bars.

As part of the plea agreement, the Lobatos have agreed to pay Pinnacol Assurance $160,000 in restitution.