Free Republic

Verizon Wireless (VZ), in its first such disclosure, says U.S. officials requested data about subscribers some 322,000 times in 2013, along with another 1,000 to 1,999 requests in the form of "National Security Letters." "Our report reflects the fact that telecom providers receive more government demands than companies in perhaps any other industry," Verizon General Counsel and Executive Vice President Randal Milch wrote in a Wednesday blog post. The company says the 321,696 total requests it received from government and law enforcement officials were up from 2012, but it didn't say how many requests it received in 2012.

Amazon.com knows you so well it wants to ship your next package before you order it. The Seattle retailer in December gained a patent for what it calls “anticipatory shipping,” a method to start delivering packages even before customers click “buy.”

Would you rather sip on unpasteurized milk or a cold glass of soda? Do you prefer Saturday lunch at a fast food joint or a farmers market? Regardless of your choices, your food freedom -- your right to grow, raise, produce, buy, sell, share, cook, eat, and drink the foods you want -- is under attack. Here are ten food freedom issues to keep an eye on in 2014. 1: FDA May Ban or Restrict a Growing Number of Food Ingredients. The FDA has proposed banning oils containing trans fats, an ingredient found in foods like coffee creamers and muffins....

Could there be a group that looks more insular, elitist and out of touch than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? One strategist for the chamber says they want "no more fools" nominated for office by the Republicans. By "fools" he meant Tea Party candidates and their ilk, and the chamber is readying to spend $50 million to defeat them in 2014. This, from an organization that has launched a thousand sinking ships. Recall that this is the same crowd that helped Mitt Romney and John McCain win GOP nominations for president. (They also supported Fred Thompson, who turned out to...

The NSA's TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency's top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting. In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn't budge. The...

A federal judge in New York has ruled that the National Security Agency's massive collection of American citizens' telephone records is both legal and useful. U.S. District Judge William Pauley wrote in his opinion issued Friday that the program "represents the government's counter-punch" to eliminate al-Qaeda's terror network. Pauley raised the specter of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and how the phone data-collection system could have helped investigators connect the dots before the attacks occurred. Pauley's decision appears to conflict with a ruling earlier this month by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who granted a preliminary injunction against the...

Police surveillance of downtown Houston will expand with the addition of 180 new cameras. The installation of the cameras means police will have nearly 1,000 surveillance feeds available to them. Most cameras are pointed on public areas around downtown, stadiums and the theater district. Police Chief Charles McClelland says Houston has more critical infrastructure than New York City and must rely on video to provide necessary police coverage...

If your New Year’s resolution is to change your light bulbs, don’t worry—the federal government’s here to help. Beginning January 1, 2014, the federal government will ban the use of 60-watt and 40-watt incandescent light bulbs. The light bulb has become a symbol in the fight for consumer freedom and against unnecessary governmental interference into the lives of the American people. 2007, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law an energy bill that placed stringent efficiency requirements on ordinary incandescent bulbs in an attempt to have them completely eliminated by 2014. The law phased out 100-watt and...

VICTORIA, Texas (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas is supporting a gay couple after the men said they were kicked out of a South Texas nightclub for dancing together to country music. The incident occurred Saturday night at a Victoria nightclub when Justin Meyer, 21, said he and his partner danced together to the country song "Cowboys and Angels," the Victoria Advocate reported (http://bit.ly/Jrh5hV ). The men said a manager approached them and told them Cactus Canyon had a policy barring two men from dancing together to country music. Meyer's partner, James Douglas, 30, said the manager...

NEW YORK (AP) - Mix blatant bigotry with poor spelling. Add a dash of ALL CAPS. Top it off with a violent threat. And there you have it: A recipe for the worst of online comments, scourge of the Internet. Blame anonymity, blame politicians, blame human nature. But a growing number of websites are reining in the Wild West of online commentary. Companies including Google and the Huffington Post are trying everything from deploying moderators to forcing people to use their real names in order to restore civil discourse. Some sites, such as Popular Science, are banning comments altogether.

Reuters reports that the NSA paid massive computer security firm RSA $10 million to promote a flawed encryption system so that the surveillance organization could wiggle its way around security. In other words, the NSA bribed the firm to leave the back door to computers all over the world open. Thanks to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, we already knew the NSA played a central role in promoting a flawed formula for generating random numbers, which if used in encryption, essentially gives the spies easy access to computing systems. A piece of RSA software, bSafe, became the most significant vector...

President Obama met with top technology industry executives on Tuesday to discuss two seemingly distinct controversies: a faulty health care website and the digital surveillance practices of the National Security Agency, Jackie Calmes and Nick Wingfield report. The meeting started with an announcement by Mr. Obama that he was reaching into the ranks of Microsoft, the software giant, to select Kurt DelBene as the next person to run HealthCare.gov. But the focus quickly turned from the health care site to the concerns of Apple, Microsoft, Google and other technology companies about the spying efforts, the latest illustration of the strained...

Maryland's health care exchange site asking weird, personal questions: ‘Where were you when you had your first kiss?’ Visitors to the Maryland health care exchange site may find themselves being asking some unusual questions, like where they were on Setpember 11, 2001, and what was the name of their first stuffed animal. Local affiliate WBAL was first to report that some residents were complaining of the unusual questions, which appear as part of the sign-up process for coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Yahoo News was able to confirm those reports during a walk-through of the site’s enrollment process. After...

A participant in a White House-sponsored review of surveillance activities described as “shameful” an apparent decision to leave most of the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk spying intact. Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute, said Friday that the review panel he advised is at risk of missing an opportunity to restore confidence in US surveillance practices. “The review group was searching for ways to make the most modest pivot necessary to continue business as usual,” Meinrath said... According to the leaks, the review group will recommend that bulk collection of every American’s phone call data continue, possibly by...

Senior figures behind efforts to curtail the powers of American spy agencies have seized on the decision by the world’s largest tech companies to call for radical surveillance reform, saying the unexpected intervention is a potential “game-changer”. In an open letter published jointly on Monday, eight tech giants, including Apple, Google and Facebook, said disclosures by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that basic rights and freedoms were being undermined. The companies – which also include Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, LinkedIn and Twitter, and have a combined value of $1.4tn – called for widespread changes that, if enacted, would...

An even split of Democratic and Republican legislators back a bill supported by Rep. Justin Amash, aiming to end the country's domestic surveillance programs. The legislation, titled The USA Freedom Act, would, if signed into law, curb the National Security Agency's ability to conduct communications sweeps and close a "back door" to information by requiring a court order when performing searches of Americans in data already collected without warrants. The Hill reported during the weekend that the bill has at least 102 cosponsors, including 51 Democrats and 51 Republicans... According to The Hill, members of Congress are placing increased pressure...

Readers of this page are well aware of the revelations during the past six months of spying by the National Security Agency (NSA). Edward Snowden, a former employee of an NSA vendor, risked his life and liberty to inform us of a governmental conspiracy to violate our right to privacy, a right guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. The conspiracy he revealed is vast. It involves former President George W. Bush, President Obama and their aides, a dozen or so members of Congress, federal judges, executives and technicians at American computer servers and telecoms, and the thousands of NSA employees and...

The University of the Incarnate Word is a highly-rated Catholic college in San Antonio, Texas. It is hardly a hot bed of campus violence. When senior Robert Cameron Redus was pulled-over last Friday by campus police for “erratically speeding,” it is unlikely he had any clue of how tragically the stop would end. The campus police department contends Redus, an honors student set to graduate in May, grabbed the officer’s steel baton during a struggle. Not in dispute, however, is that Redus was shot five times by the officer, at close range, leaving him dead and the University scrambling to...

The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a "target-rich communications network" where intelligence targets could "hide in plain sight". Games, the analyst wrote, "are an opportunity!". According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other. If properly exploited, games could produce vast amounts of intelligence, according to the NSA document. They could be used as a...

EX-OFFICIAL SAYS FBI CAN SECRETLY ACTIVATE AN INDIVIDUAL’S WEBCAM WITHOUT THE INDICATOR LIGHT TURNING ON The FBI can secretly activate a computer’s webcam to spy on an individual without turning on the indicator light, a former official revealed to the Washington Post in an article published Friday. According to the Washington Post’s account of what Marcus Thomas — former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico — said, “The FBI has been able to covertly activate a computer’s camera — without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording — for several years, and has...