Free Republic

Citing the Heath and Human Services website, a report posted Wednesday at the Freedom Outpost says that under Obamacare, government agents can engage in "home health visits" for those in certain “high-risk” categories. Those categories include: • Families where mom is not yet 21; • Families where someone is a tobacco user; • Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities, and • Families with individuals who are serving or formerly served in the armed forces, including such families that have members of the armed forces who have had multiple deployments outside the United States.

Google is beta-testing a program that tracks users’ purchasing habits by registering brick-and-mortar store visits via smartphones, according to a report from Digiday. Google can access user data via Android apps or their Apple iOS apps, like Google search, Gmail, Chrome, or Google Maps.If a customer is using these apps while he shops or has them still running in the background, Google’s new program pinpoints the origin of the user data and determines if the customer is in a place of business.Google gets permission to do this kind of tracking when Android users opt in to the “location services” option...

A friend went to help another friend who is running for the local School Committee. I'm being coy because my friend did a little undercover work and showed me screenshots of the software the candidate was using, something called VoteBuilder, "a partnership between the DNC and the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee." It was as sophisticated as anything I have seen while volunteering for Romney and McCain. The software provides the voter name, age, phone number, the voter's polling location, a script for the caller to read with questions like, "Do you need a ride to the polls?" Nothing revolutionary here,...

Dressed in Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman Halloween costumes. A Massachusetts woman was reportedly fired after racially insensitive images surfaced online of her sons dressed as Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman for Halloween. Caitlin Cimeno reportedly posted photos of her sons, William Filene and Greg Cimeno, with the caption: "Happy Halloween from Zimmerman & trayvon (insert smiley face emoji here)," according to a piece by Myeisha Essex at BlackAmericaWeb. Following the outrageous post, members of the social media world not only tracked her down, but eventually also her employer, who told a caller that she no longer worked there, reports...

WASHINGTON — As America's road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car. The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America's major roads.

Hundreds are marching on the National Mall in Washington, DC to protest covert NSA surveillance operations on the anniversary of the Patriot Act. The organizers are planning to present Congress with a petition which has acquired over 570,000 signatures. Stop Watching Us is a collective of 100 public advocacy groups, among them the American Civil Liberties Union, Freedom Works, as well as individuals like Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden to expose many of the NSAÂ’s surveillance procedures. The rally is scheduled to begin at 11:30 am local time on October...

When Bob Dylan sang “When you’ve got nothing you’ve got nothing to lose” he could hardly have imagined how true his words would ring almost fifty years later. Being against national photo ID cards was something the Right and the Left agreed on for privacy reasons. There was good reason to be against such cards in the past; but today they are a concern as meaningless as worrying about where to place a new telephone booth. After five years of the reign of King Barack during which he has used every agency in his control to spy on everyone in...

Germany said it believed that U.S. intelligence agencies may be spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, an intrusion that it said would constitute a “grave breach of trust” between the longtime allies. Ms. Merkel called President Barack Obama on Wednesday and made clear that such surveillance among allies would be “fully unacceptable,” her spokesman, Steffen [...]

What does gun control have to do with health care? As odd as it seems, Obamacare contains provisions that jeopardize gun ownership, especially for veterans. Anti-gun provisions were added to initial drafts of Obamacare legislation under the pretext of prohibiting people with mental illness – which can include PTSD - from owning guns. Fortunately, the NRA stepped in and got some of the worst language revised last December. Senate amendment 3276, Sec. 2716, part c. prohibits the creation of a firearms database and stops doctors from disclosing or collecting information relating to a patient’s firearms. Ironically, this provision was probably...

First lady Michelle Obama is poised for a second appearance on “The Biggest Loser,”NBC’s reality show to help contestants lose weight. Her reason for doing the show? To promote her campaign for the need to drink more water, The Hill reported.

Parents of high school students in Montgomery County School District in Maryland were outraged recently by a survey given to sophomores under the new Common Core education standards. The survey asked numerous intrusive questions that a school has no business asking students. Among them were questions like "what is your sexual orientation," "what's your religion," "what's your parents' political affiliation" and "should assault rifles be banned?" Angry parents notified the news website The Blaze about the survey, and shortly after a Blaze reporter began to ask about it, the survey disappeared from the Poolesville High School website. According to The...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending the NSA's bulk call records database as a "vital" counterterrorism tool. While this wouldn't make the program legal even if true, it also seems clear that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has relied, rather uncritically, on the government's assertions of "necessity" to draw the strained conclusion that every American's phone records are "relevant" to FBI counterterrorism investigations. It's thus worth pointing out how extraordinarily weak the case for the program's utility really is. Feinstein begins by recycling the claim that if only the NSA program...

The technical disasters of the Obamacare exchange debacle over the past two weeks are not an accident, but rather a way to disguise the costs of healthcare plans and weed out people who don’t qualify for a federal subsidy, Forbes reports. Tech experts examining the Obamacare federal health exchange, Healthcare.gov, are becoming increasingly convinced that the traffic bottlenecks and site crashes experienced over the first two weeks were not by accident, wrote Forbes. An HHS spokesperson recently told The Wall Street Journal that implementation of a feature enabling users with the option to preview premiums was delayed as a way...

We've long suspected that the NSA, the world's premiere spy agency, was pretty good at breaking into computers. But now, thanks to an article by security expert Bruce Schneier—who is working with the Guardian to go through the Snowden documents—we have a much more detailed view of how the NSA uses exploits in order to infect the computers of targeted users. The template for attacking people with malware used by the NSA is in widespread use by criminals and fraudsters, as well as foreign intelligence agencies, so it's important to understand and defend against this threat to avoid being a...

...[W]e ran a story in March 2012 which exposed the NSA's unprecedented domestic espionage project, codenamed Stellar Wind, and specifically the $1.4+ billion data center spy facility located in Bluffdale, Utah, which spans more than one million square feet, uses 65 megawatts of energy (enough to power a city of more than 20,000), and can store exabytes or even zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is 100 million times larger than all the printed material in the Library of Congress), consisting of every single electronic communication in the world, whether captured with a warrant or not. Yet despite all signs to...

The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA's application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of the systems intelligence directorate, or SID. The majority of NSA employees work in SID, which is tasked with collecting data from communications systems around the world. According to a top-secret NSA presentation provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, one successful technique the NSA has developed involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. The...

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said he will push legislation to end the NSA's controversial program to collect records on all U.S. phone calls. He argued that the program invades Americans' privacy rights while doing little to thwart terrorist attacks. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, argued that the phone data program is critical for protecting national security. "I will do everything I can to prevent this program from being canceled," Feinstein said during the hearing....

Valerie Plame warns the "CBS This Morning" co-hosts that the NSA surveillance program should not just worry terrorists, but all of us.

The flood of stories on government spying will not be slowing soon -- in fact the majority of the most important documents detailing how the U.S. National Security Agency collects personal data have not been published yet, journalists from U.K. newspaper The Guardian said on Tuesday. The British newspaper responsible for breaking many of the stories surrounding the government surveillance program known as Prism said that there are thousands of relevant documents that it has obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Of those documents, the majority of ones that should, and will, be published still remain, said Glenn Greenwald,...

Over the last three years, the FBI has dramatically expanded its No-Fly List of suspected terrorists, including blacklisting innocent Americans who present no threat to security.... The FBI's violation of these Americans' due process rights is, in and of itself, abusive and unlawful. After all, preventing people from correcting the errors that led to their inclusion on a blacklist does not make our skies any safer, but it does harm constitutionally protected rights to travel and reputation—as a federal court recently recognized. And a closer look into the experiences of several ACLU clients shows another, even darker side to the...