Free Republic

The highly encrypted email service reportedly used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden has gone offline - and its administrator claims the company is legally barred from explaining why. On Thursday, the homepage of Lavabit.com was changed to a letter from the company’s owner announcing that the site’s operations have ceased following a six-week long ordeal that has prompted the company to take legal action in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Now in the midst of an escalating fight from the federal government aimed at cracking down on encrypted communications, one of the last free and secure services has thrown...

http://www.seattle.gov/directory/department.asp?ID=149 The story about Seattle civil rights commission banning the use of the word "citizen" -- http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/02/seattle-officials-call-for-ban-on-potentially-offensive-language/

A former U.S. official told The Journal that some of the technology allows the FBI to remotely activate the microphones in phones running on Google Inc.'s Android software to record conversations.

CNET has learned the FBI has developed custom "port reader" software to intercept Internet metadata in real time. And, in some cases, it wants to force Internet providers to use the software. The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies' internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts. FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams. The FBI's legal position during these discussions is that the software's real-time interception...

SEATTLE - An internal memo at Seattle City Hall is causing quite a stir. It suggests government workers no longer use the terms "citizen," or "brown bag."  According to the Office for Civil Rights, the terms are potentially offensive and other words should be used. "Luckily, we've got options," Elliott Bronstein of the Office for Civil Rights wrote in the memo. "For 'citizens,' how about 'residents?'" Bronstein wrote. The Office of Civil Rights says Seattle serves all residents, whether they're United States citizens or not. And while city leaders publicize "brown bag" lunch meetings as a way to designate...

The Commerce Department has made changes to how it calculates gross domestic product, designed to have the data better reflect the so-called knowledge economy. The U.S. government adjusted data all the way back to 1929, and other countries have or are about to make similar changes to their data.

Change.gov, the website created by the Obama transition team in 2008, has effectively disappeared sometime over the last month. While the front splash page for Change.gov has linked to the main White House website for years, until recently, you could still continue on to see the materials and agenda laid out by the administration. This was a particularly helpful resource for those looking to compare Obama's performance in office against his vision for reform, laid out in detail on Change.gov. According to the Internet Archive, the last time that content (beyond the splash page) was available was June 8th --...

The disgracefully slanted coverage of the trial of George Zimmerman is only the latest, prominent example of liberal media bias. Since the 2012 presidential election, America’s national media hasn’t let up. It’s pushing harder on its pro-liberal Democrat and anti-conservative Republican slant. Consider Obamacare. In recent days, organized labor turned harshly and vocally against the so called “Affordable Care Act.” Three leaders of America’s largest unions, including Jimmy Hoffa, wrote a jaw-dropping letter to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Excerpts of their arguments sound like a Republican opposition brief: “When you and the President sought oursupport for the Affordable Care...

Just when I thought the bizarre, destructive Obammunist era  couldn't get any weirder, NOW I find myself siding with the ACLU!!! Watch this clip and tell me you don't, too- not all that far from what one ought to be expecting: once privacy is as fully breached -as the Obama regime is attempting- it's never coming back... doesn't work that way! If you're counting on the Constitution and courts to protect your privacy, what did they do to guard you from (unconstitutional by any sane measure) Obamacare being rammed down your throat? NOTHING- and it doesn't look like there'll be anybody remaining to...

Former vice president Dick Cheney said Sunday that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was wrong to suggest that the government’s recently revealed sweeping surveillance techniques are an invasion of Americans’ privacy. “Two-thirds of the Congress wasn’t here on 9/11, or for that period immediately after when we got into this program,” Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday.” He later added: “When you consider the possibility of somebody smuggling something like a nuclear device into the United States, it becomes very, very important to gather intelligence on your enemies and stop that attack before it ever gets launched.” Cheney defended a National...

What can literary fiction teach us about recent revelations that the National Security Agency has aggressively been gathering massive amounts of data on American citizens? The novel one usually turns to, of course, is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its terrifying vision of the Thought Police. Even President Obama, in response to questions about the NSA, has been forced to deny that the government has engaged in “Big Brother” tactics. Orwell’s book, however, isn’t the most compelling or accurate literary prediction of modern surveillance. That award goes to a less obvious title: J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s most...

Half of all voters consider radical Muslims the bigger terrorist threat facing the nation, but supporters of President Obama consider the Tea Party to be as big a danger. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters consider radical Muslims to be the bigger threat to the United States today. Thirteen percent (13%) view the Tea Party that way, and another 13% consider other political and religious extremists to be the larger danger. Six percent (6%) point to local militia groups. Two percent (2%) see the Occupy Wall Street movement as the bigger terrorist...

Ri Erased from Kim Funeral Committee By Lee Sang Yong [2013-06-21 20:26 ] Facebook Twitter Daily NK has learned that Ri Yong Ho [alternate spelling: Lee Young Ho], the former Chosun PeopleÂ’s Army Chief-of-Staff who was purged in July last year, has been erased from the official funeral committee listing of Kim Jong Il. Ri had been behind then-Prime Minister Choi Young Rim in fourth place on the committee list, which, in its original form, serves as a key indicator of the relative power of officials at the time of Kim Jong IlÂ’s death in December 2011. Daily NK gathered...

Watch the video (at link above). It's only a few minutes.Here's the company's website

“1984” Live! US Surveillance Scandal Is The Biggest Story Of Your Lifetime By Julio Severo “The (National Security Agency) NSA surveillance scandal is the biggest story of your lifetime” – that was, according WND, Michael Savage’s message all this week, as details emerged about the US government spying on Americans and people around the world. However, “They obviously weren’t spying on Muslims, or people known to have associated with terrorists,” Savage pointed out. Otherwise, the authorities would have prevented the Boston Marathon bombing. The White House assures that its massive surveillance is to stop terrorists, and yet it won’t...

A Tennessee community college professor ordered her students to wear ribbons in support of gay rights and said those who supported the traditional definition of marriage are just “uneducated bigots” who “attack homosexuals with hate,” according to a legal firm representing several of the students in the class. Students in a general psychology class at Columbia State Community College were directed by their professor to wear “Rainbow Coalition” ribbons for an entire day and express their support for the homosexual community, said Travis Barham, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. Barham is calling for the college to punish Dr....

Edward Snowden, America's most wanted whistle-blower, participated in a live online chat with the Guardian newspaper on Monday. "All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me," Snowden wrote. "Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

George Orwell's famous novel, 1984, was published in 1949, and he predicted that people in the future would have no privacy, as governments would monitor all their activities. The "big brother is watching" phrase became well known. But Orwell could never have predicted the technologies of the future, when he described a fictional system of oppression based on technologies that were available in 1949. In 1949, there were no personal computers, no cell phones, no internet, no satellites, etc. In the communist regimes of 1949, most people did not own telephones, therefore there were no phones to bug. Most people...

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano weighed in on the NSA intelligence leaks on Friday, telling NY1 that fears over government surveillance were overblown. “I think people have gotten the idea that there’s an Orwellian state out there that somehow we’re operating in. That’s far from the case,” she told Errol Louis during an appearance on Road to City Hall. Despite civil liberties advocates’ fears that monitoring efforts have gone too far, “there are lots of protections built into the system,” Ms. Napolitano said, pointing to a privacy office embedded in her own department that is “constantly reviewing our policies and...