Home » July 30th, 2010
Entries posted on “July, 2010”
It is just a technical matter, the Obama administration says: We just need to make a slight change in a law to make clear that we have the right to see the names of anyone’s e-mail correspondents and their Web browsing history without the messy complication of asking a judge for permission.
It is far more than a technical change. The administration’s request, reported Thursday in The Washington Post, is an unnecessary and disappointing step backward toward more intrusive surveillance from a president who promised something very different during the 2008 campaign.
July 30th, 2010 | Posted in Big Bro,Police State,Tech,Web-Only Content | Read More »
Even just a decade ago, major pieces of legislation in the U.S. Congress would be just a few dozen pages long. But today, it seems like every time Congress passes an important bill it ends up being over a thousand pages long. In fact, the final version of the new financial reform law was over 2,300 pages. Overall, as we wrote about extensively in a previous article, this much-ballyhooed new law does a whole lot of nothing, but it turns out that lobbyists and special interests were able to insert a few nasty surprises that we are just now finding out about. But it was the same thing with the health care reform law. It was only after it was passed that most of us learned that it contained a provision that will force U.S. small businesses to collectively produce millions more 1099 tax forms each year. Now small businesses from coast to coast are screaming bloody murder about that provision but it is too late – the law has already passed. Unfortunately, there are some surprises in the recently passed financial reform law that are nearly just as bad.
So just what are those surprises?
July 30th, 2010 | Posted in Politics,Web-Only Content | Read More »
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
July 29th, 2010 | Posted in Big Bro,Police State,Tech,Web-Only Content | Read More »
Attorney speculates data could include Facebook friend requests
The White House has asked Congress to make it possible for the FBI to demand that Internet service providers turn over customers’ records in cases involving terrorism or other intelligence issues without first obtaining a court order.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act currently states that companies are required to provide basic subscriber data to the FBI, but lists only the four kinds of information that might be found on phone bills — customer’s name, address, length of service, and toll billing records.
In 2008, the Justice Department ruled that those four categories were “exhaustive,” making some companies reluctant to provide any additional information. The proposed amendment would add the phrase “electronic communication transactional records” to the list in order to include the recipients of emails and when they were sent and received — though not their content. It might also cover web browsing history.
July 29th, 2010 | Posted in Big Bro,Police State,Tech,Web-Only Content | Read More »
America- The bill HR5741 is government sanctioned slavery. Read it and weep.
According to opencongress.org, It was introduced on July 15th by Charles Rangel D-NY. You know what to do.
The defining paragraph reads,
‘To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, and for other purposes.’
July 28th, 2010 | Posted in Politics,Web-Only Content | Read More »
When I broke into news reporting during the 1950s, the advice from veteran journalists was: “Kid, if a story is important, stay with it, even if few other reporters do.” Since news of our pilotless killer drones hurling more Hellfire missiles abroad has largely vanished from our press, here is more evidence of President Obama’s fixation on this dark side of our war on terrorism.
An impressive exception to the inattention to Obama’s favorite weapon is investigative reporter Adam Entous of Reuters. In “How the White House learned to love the drone” (May 18), he quotes two administration officials (who, of course, refused to be named) saying that killing wanted terrorists is simply “easier than capturing them.”
July 28th, 2010 | Posted in Foreign Policy,Web-Only Content | Read More »
It is a lazy afternoon. Or at least it was until I came across a blog by Mish. There was little in the post that I didn’t know or suspect, but this quote triggered a reaction:
It hides the economic substance of what’s really happening-an unlimited taxpayer bailout.
William Black, a former no-nonsense regulator, described in that statement everything that has happened and continues to happen. It represents the federal government’s approach to “saving” the economy — subterfuge and no limits. Mish went on to add:
To address the situation, the FDIC is going to start selling U.S.-guaranteed FDIC senior certificates. However, it has no Congressional authority to do so according to former thrift regulator William Black.
These quotes summarized the double-speak, unconstitutional acts, bullying, outright lies, and trampling of the Rule of Law that now describes our government.
July 28th, 2010 | Posted in Economy,Web-Only Content | Read More »
When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it.
During the first part of this period, the Republicans were in control. They expanded a vast national security bureaucracy. In their series in The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin detail the size of this apparatus. More than 1,200 government agencies and 1,900 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence programs at around 10,000 sites across the country. An estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearance. These analysts produce 50,000 reports a year — a flow of paper so great that many are completely ignored.
July 26th, 2010 | Posted in Big Bro,Police State,Tech,Web-Only Content | Read More »
Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt, a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement.
In a hard-hitting and exclusive new exclusive video just released by Climate Depot, Dr. Rancourt declares that the entire man-made global warming movement is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else,” Rancourt, who has published peer-reviewed research, explained in a June 8, 2010 essay. (Rancourt’s email: claude.cde@gmail.com)
July 26th, 2010 | Posted in Environment,Web-Only Content | Read More »
A federal judge pushed back Thursday against a contention by the Obama Justice Department that a tough new Arizona immigration law set to take effect next week would cause “irreparable harm” and intrude into federal immigration enforcement.
“Why can’t Arizona be as inhospitable as they wish to people who have entered or remained in the United States?” U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton asked in a pointed exchange with Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler. Her comment came during a rare federal court hearing in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer (R).
July 25th, 2010 | Posted in Immigration,Web-Only Content | Read More »
-
Designed by