Free Republic

The Government Is Monitoring Facebook And Twitter By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-12-14 11:59 "The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters." So ominously began an editorial [1] in Sunday's New York Times. Those with accounts at such websites should pay attention, for according to the Times, and other sources, Big Brother is watching you: The Wall Street Journal reported this summer that state revenue agents have been searching for tax scofflaws by mining information on MySpace and Facebook. In October, the F.B.I. searched the New York home of...

Tired of waiting for Congress to pass the “Cap-and-Trade” bill, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it will initiate its own measures to control carbon dioxide emissions. The thrust of the EPA’s approach will be to determine a carbon emissions “budget” for every individual household and assess fines and penalties for those whose emissions exceed an allowable amount. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson acknowledged that this approach would be more costly than a cap and trade system, but defended it as “leverage to induce Congress to take action. Carbon dioxide is the most dangerous pollutant because there are so many...

Cheating scenario, 1989: There were errant signs. Like the times you phoned the office and it rang and rang ("I was in the conference room," he said), like the matchbooks from places with names like the Candlelight Inn, where you'd never been. There were always plausible explanations. Work lunches! Work trips! Work lipstick! You wondered if you were crazy. There was so much wondering. Months, maybe years of uncertainty. Cheating scenario, 2009: I found your text messages, Jerk boy. Pack your bags. There are so many questions about Tiger Woods's reported affairs. (A cocktail waitress? Really? Have you seen his...

Justification and Options for Creating U.S. Capabilities Establishing security is the sine qua non of stability operations, since it is a prerequisite for reconstruction and development. Security requires a mix of military and police forces to deal with a range of threats from insurgents to criminal organizations. This research examines the creation of a high-end police force, which the authors call a Stability Police Force (SPF). The study considers what size force is necessary, how responsive it needs to be, where in the government it might be located, what capabilities it should have, how it could be staffed, and its...

There are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain watching our every move. In London, there are more CCTV cameras than any other city in the world with one camera for every eight Londoners. But as victims of crime have found to their cost, catching criminals on camera is dependent on the equipment being both monitored and maintained. BBC Inside Out's investigation has found that all too often Big Brother either is not watching, had a broken camera, lost the footage or could not be bothered to go through the tapes. Even within the Metropolitan Police itself, there are differences of...

Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) yesterday introduced a new measure, ostensibly designed to assist law enforcement in tracking gun purchases by suspected terrorists. Critics, however, suggest that it is yet another measure aimed at the eventual total disarmament of all law-abiding Americans. In a press release issued yesterday, Senator Lautenberg's office described the act that he calls the PROTECT Act. This is by no means the first Act of Congress named by that acronym. The current measure's full title is "Preserving Records Of TErrorist and Criminal Transactions." However, the only transactions that the measure is designed to preserve are gun...

Police are routinely arresting people simply to record their DNA profiles on the national database, according to a report published today. It also states that three quarters of young black men are on the database. The finding risks stigmatising a whole section of society, the equality watchdog has warned. The revelations will fuel the debate about the DNA database, the world’s largest. They are included in a report by the Human Genetics Commission, an independent government advisory body. It criticises the piecemeal development of the database and questions how effective it is in helping the police to investigate and solve...

FACEBOOK can be a double-edged sword, a Canadian woman learned when an insurance company cut her health benefits, claiming she was healthy after seeing pictures of her smiling in bikini at the beach. Nathalie Blanchard, 29, took long-term sick leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec, more than a year ago for severe depression. She was receiving monthly benefits from her insurance company, Manulife. When Ms Blanchard called Manulife to ask why the payments dried up, the insurance company said that "I'm available to work, because of Facebook," she told CBC television. She said that Manulife cited several...

People who unlawfully download copyrighted material could be disconnected from their internet accounts as part of the Digital Economy Bill, a major overhaul to the UK's technology legislation. The bill, unveiled on Friday, will oblige ISPs to send notifications to customers who are suspected of infringing copyright. ISPs will also be forced to record the number of notifications a user has received and send this data to rights holders, such as record companies, so they can apply for a court order for the user's name and address. The rights holder can then launch civil proceedings against the infringer. The minister...

Does President Obama "uses" the military for photo-ops? President Obama will tell us his comments fit the mood of the crowd, but when I first heard Obama’s comments in South Korea stating hundreds of troops in uniform was a good photo op, my eyes rolled. Our American forces are not a political tool to be used by politicians in constant campaign mode as a photo op. Couldn’t he just thank the troops and say he was humbled by their work effort and thank them for coming out to greet him? Nope. From today’s Washington Times…

How "Photo Tagger" lets anybody recognize you Facebook likes to talk about privacy, but the truth is the site is all about revealing yourself. A new app, however, may take Facebook's hey-look-at-me culture one step too far. It's called "Photo Tagger," from a company called Face.com. It uses amazing photo recognition technology to take your uploaded photos, go out to the Web, and identify them through "tags." That in itself doesn't sound all that bad, but when we tried this in the newsroom, it scared the crap out of just about everybody with a Facebook account. Here's why: While it's...

The phrase “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” sounds innocent enough. Who could be against such an agreement? But in fact it appears to be a pretext for a massive invasion of privacy, motivated in part by the entertainment industry seeking to maintain copyrights. But once unleashed, such an assault on freedom will know no bounds. What if Big Brother finds on your laptop that you think ID supports certain traditional moral views, and what if any articulation of such views comes to be regarded as a hate crime? (Click excerpt link for MUST SEE VIDEO!)

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day. The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization. Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the...

In Utah, the National Security Agency is building a $2 billion storage facility that will house and analyze all forms of electronic communication...a potential yottabyte of everyone's (formerly) personal data. So how big is a yottabyte? CrunchGear puts it well: There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. In terms of data on current human scales, a yottabyte is nearly infinite (though I'm sure the NSA will manage...

There’s an interesting article in the current New York Review of books (predictably, a book review) detailing the history of the National Security Agency, that shadowy power-behind-the-power to which we surrender much of our privacy. That in itself is interesting, but I found the introduction a bit shocking: the NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data. And what is a yottabyte? I’m glad you asked. There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes...

Not long ago, Americans feared and ridiculed the police states cursing too many parts of the world. We worried that they might one day conquer us despite their poverty and general misery even as we mocked their totalitarian tactics — especially their “Papers, please” mentality.  Indeed, being forced to prove one’s identity to a bureaucrat on demand, having to carry and produce documents with personal information for his approval — or condemnation — seemed especially horrifying. One of our classic films, Casablanca, revolved around the deadly hassles of obtaining or forging such papers under the Nazis; episodes of Mission Impossible...

Feeling guilty about not doing enough exercise? Well, guilt might soon be the least of your problems. Thanks to a new Big Brother-style gadget being adopted by American companies — and coming to Britain early next year — bosses can measure exactly how many calories you are burning in a day and compare the data with “performance benchmarks”. In other words: staying in shape might soon become as important as getting to the office on time. The gadget, from the Dutch electronics company Philips, is slightly larger than a postage stamp and must be carried around at all times, either...

I’ve written previously on HUMAN EVENTS about the state of Big Brother Britain, and things are only getting worse. News broke this week that the police have a series of databases recording the personal details of thousands of people who attend protests or rallies, which are searchable by a number of officers and come complete with color photographs assembled and printed onto “spotter cards” which are then distributed to enable agencies to monitor attendees at events. Cost of this part of the surveillance state alone? Over nine million pounds. Moreover, we have the most CCTV of any country, we have...

You dirty rat. Chicago and Cook County residents aren’t the only ones about to get shocking tax news; the city is debuting a “tax whistle-blower” plan that could turn neighbor against neighbor in Chicago’s business community. The folks at city hall will pay cash bounties to informants who turn in business tax cheats around the city. The reward would amount to some sort of percentage of the tax money that the city recovers. "It's just another way of bringing people into compliance," Revenue Department spokesman Ed Walsh told the Sun-Times. "It would probably be ... a business knowing that a...

Personal details about thousands of people – said to include those only suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience – are being compiled on a database run by the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). The data includes pictures of people taken demonstrations and other observations made by police on the scene, such as vehicle registration numbers. These enable cars to be tracked using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. The Guardian reported that a man with no criminal record was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after he...

POOLE, England — It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives. A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore. But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the...

The Federal Communications Commission today opened a proceeding to consider net neutrality rules, the culmination of contentious lobbying by the telecom industry and an intense exchange of letters from members of Congress. With a 3-2 vote along party lines, the five-member panel began the process to move forward with open-Internet regulations announced last month by the agency's chairman, Juilus Genachowski. His proposal would formally codify the FCC's current four principles intended to prevent Internet service providers from giving preferential treatment to certain content and services and therefore deciding which applications consumers have access to. He also proposed two additional principles,...

First Amendment: Diversity czar Mark Lloyd's FCC votes Thursday on the issue of net neutrality. Advertised as providing access to all, it will do to the information superhighway what Lloyd proposed for talk radio. Not much was said when $7.2 billion was included in the stimulus bill "to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved and underserved areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits." The administration has big plans for the Internet — like controlling it. Susan Crawford, the so-called Internet czar, told the Wall Street Journal in April that the broadband billions...

Parking attendants in Malmö are to have miniature video cameras attached to their caps as part of a bid to increase the safety of members of a profession often exposed to threats and harassment. Starting this Wednesday, a number of meter maids from municipal firm Parkering Malmö will begin wearing the cap-borne cameras, which can register sound and video and are activated when an inspector pushes a button. The resultant video clips will be saved, and may be used as evidence for incidents that are reported to the police or go to trial. All other clips will be erased. "By...

A reality TV star was arrested in Massachusetts over the weekend. Adam Jasinski, who won CBS' "Big Brother" last year, was charged with dealing oxycodone in North Reading Saturday. According to the Boston Herald, Jasinski allegedly told a DEA agent that he used the $500,000 he won on the show to bankroll a drug-dealing operation on the East Coast. Federal prosecutors say Jasinski spoke to an undercover agent from his home in Delray Beach, Florida and agreed to fly to Boston to sell the agent 2,000 oxycodone pills. Once Jasinski arrived at Logan Airport, the agent drove him to a...

On September 10th of this year the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) posted a press release informing the world that “from October 19-25, more than 60 network TV shows [will] spotlight the power and personal benefits of service,� and that this “unprecedented block of TV programming is the first wave of a multi-year ‘I Participate’ campaign.� On its face this all sounds rather benign in that silly, liberal do-gooder kind of way. The networks have launched these kinds of campaigns before and other than some clunky exposition awkwardly inserted into your favorite show to meet the mandate — no harm, no...

On September 10th of this year the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) posted a press release informing the world that “from October 19-25, more than 60 network TV shows [will] spotlight the power and personal benefits of service,” and that this “unprecedented block of TV programming is the first wave of a multi-year ‘I Participate’ campaign.”

Motorists should be forced to pay to drive on the busiest roads to slash greenhouse gas emissions, the Government's climate change watchdog says today. The Climate Change Committee, led by former CBI chief Lord Turner, wants ministers to introduce compulsory road pricing to prevent global warming. Under the controversial scheme, cars would be fitted with electronic tags and tracked either by satellite or roadside beacon. Charges would rise at times of peak congestion to around £1.50 a mile. In a report to MPs, the advisers called for a carbon revolution - with thousands of wind turbines, nuclear power stations...

Allowing social workers and health authorities to monitor households, adding to concern at Britain's surveillance society. The devices, which the government plans to install in every home by 2020, will also tell energy firms what sort of appliances are being used, allowing companies to target customers who do not reduce their energy consumption. Privacy campaigners have expressed horror at the proposals, which come as two million homes have 'spy' devices fitted to their rubbish bins by councils who record how much residents are recycling. The government wants every home in Britain to have smart meters, which give users information on...

Welcome to the new Justice.gov. If you’re a regular visitor to our site, you’ll notice some changes today. If you are joining us for the first time, welcome. The Department of Justice launches Justice.gov today in an effort to increase openness and transparency in government. Utilizing a variety of online tools, we will be able to share news and information, not just on our own web site, but through popular social networks Twitter, YouTube and MySpace and Facebook. The Justice presence on these social networks will allow Americans to interact with the Department in entirely new ways. The new Justice.gov...

New York - On the heels of breaking up an alleged bomb terror plot, New York is planning to place high-tech security cameras, license plate readers, and "weapons sensors" in midtown Manhattan. Office workers and tourists – and possible terrorists – will have cameras watching their every move as they visit Macy's, shop for diamonds at Tiffany & Co., or gawk in Times Square. The apparatus, paid for by some $24 million in Department of Homeland Security funding, will expand a similar effort already underway in lower Manhattan where cameras focus on the Federal Reserve, the New York Stock Exchange,...

The wild, wild Web, where anything goes, could become less wild this year if federal regulators have their way. The Federal Trade Commission on Monday took steps to make product information and online reviews more accurate for consumers, regulating blogging for the first time and mandating that testimonials reflect typical results. Under the new rules, which take effect Dec. 1, writers on the Web must clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products. Testimonials will have to spell out what consumers should expect to experience with their products. Until now, companies just included disclaimers...

As Montana bars dealt with their first smoke-free weekend since the state’s indoor smoking ban went into effect, ingenuity ruled. In Missoula, according to a great piece by Michael Moore in the Missoulian, the Rhino Bar gave smokers their very own place to light up: a Butt Hutt, created by Dave Golden of Well Done Welding and Jim Bell, a general contractor. Moore describes the hut as a 4-by-8-foot “metal smoking dugout” in the alley behind the Rhino in Missoula. The no-smoking laws spark the type of debate that never seems to get extinguished. Pro-smokers argue that the bans hurt...

Researchers from Georgia Tech have devised methods to take real-time, real-world information and layer it onto Google Earth, adding dynamic information to the previously sterile Googlescape. They use live video feeds (sometimes from many angles) to find the position and motion of various objects, which they then combine with behavioral simulations to produce real-time animations for Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth. They use motion capture data to help their animated humans move realistically, and were able to extrapolate cars' motion throughout an entire stretch of road from just a few spotty camera angles. From their video of an augmented...

Obama science czar John Holdren stated in a college textbook that "illegitimate children" born to unwed mothers could be taken by the government and put up for adoption if the mother refused to have an abortion. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, argued that "illegitimate childbearing could be strongly discouraged" as a socioeconomic measure imposed to control population growth. As previously reported, WND has obtained a copy of the 1970s college textbook "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment" that Holdren co-authored with Malthusian population alarmist Paul R. Ehrlich and Ehrlich's wife, Anne. The authors argued involuntary...

Recently declassified documents obtained by Wired magazine reveal a massive Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data mining operation. It already possesses over 1.5 billion records from government and private-sector sources. That figure is expected by the FBI to balloon to over 6 billion within a few years. And it is not just terrorists they are after.  According to the documents, the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is being used to pursue multiple types of non-terrorism domestic investigations. It is also meant to be able to sort through the data — everything from health and travel records to credit card...

<p>Nearly 20 young children are captured in an online video as they sing songs that overflow with campaign slogans and praise for "Barack Hussein Obama," as they repeatedly chant the president's name and celebrate his accomplishments.</p> <p>A video posted on YouTube appears to show a New Jersey elementary school class being taught to sing praises of the "great accomplishments" of President Obama.</p>

I'm having a this is Armagedon moment with this electronic healthcare records thing and had to vent...Once electronic healthcare records is a reality, how compelling will the argument be to mandate rf chips in all our hands... the first chips will be inserted on a voluntary basis of course.. Perhaps 5 to 10% of the population will participate. Non-Christians only of course. EMT workers will arrive on scene, scan the victim, the screen pops up with warnings and recommendations, and lives will be saved. And I have no doubt this techonogy would save lives. The media will diligently report everytime...

"EU funding 'Orwellian' artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for "abnormal behaviour" The European Union is spending millions of pounds developing "Orwellian" technologies designed to scour the internet and CCTV images for "abnormal behaviour"." SNIPPET: "A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as "agents" to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers. Its main objectives include the "automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence"." SNIPPET: "Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police...

There is so very much to be disgusted by here that it’s hard to know what to gag on first. The NEA is the largest single funder of art in the country. The transcripts prove, despite the earlier denials and obfuscations of the participants, that officials from the White House, the National Endowment of the Arts and a federally overseen initiative called United We Serve joined in hosting a conference call on August 10th with a group of artists. The point of the call was to cajole these artists into making artistic propaganda in support of President Barack Obama’s agenda.

Citing environmental and energy-conservation rationales, the California Energy Commission has served notice that it will ban big screen televisions beginning in the year 2011. “These large screen TVs consume an inordinate amount of energy,” said Commission Chairwoman Karen Douglas. “No one needs their own personal big screen. Generations of Americans got along fine with smaller TVs. In fact, while many alive today may find it hard to believe, there were no TVs in American homes 70 years ago. So, I think our action is far less draconian than it might have been.” Douglas pointed out that “those who still need...

We now learn that the White House , though a private contractor, and without anyone’s knowledge, is collecting and storing comments made on it’s social networking sites at Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and Sideshare. The truly amazing part though is that the President is pointing to federal law as his justification for these actions.

The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama's promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet. Defenders of the White House actions said the Presidential Records Act requires that the administration gather the information and that it was justified in taking the additional step of asking a private contractor to "crawl and archive" all such material. Nicholas Shapiro, a White House...

The city just installed high-tech cameras that catch every car that rolls through the city limits. And city residents say they are willing to give up privacy for protection. Resident Kay Stelter says she feels a little better knowing that there are an extra set of eyes keeping tabs. "I do, even though it makes me nervous that it's me that they're seeing," she said. For years, people in Medina have relied on gates to protect their homes and property. But now they've added surveillance video. The Medina City Council approved the cameras after Medina reported 11 burglaries in 2008...

Energy Savings: Europe's ban on the incandescent light bulb began phasing in this month, and the U.S. will soon follow. Is Thomas Edison to blame for global warming? And why are we exporting green jobs?When the warm-mongers assemble in Copenhagen this December to hammer out a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol, no doubt their work to save the earth from the carbon dioxide that gives it life will take place under the eerie light thrown off by compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) mandated by the European Union to fight climate change. The bulbs are more expensive, costing up to...

When Barack Obama won Florida last November — the first Democrat to take the Sunshine State since FDR — many saw it as a sign of centrist GOP Governor Charlie Crist's moderating influence. But lately, Florida's disgruntled Republicans aren't looking very moderate. This week, in fact, the peninsula's GOP registered arguably the loudest outcry over the education speech President Obama plans to deliver to U.S. primary and secondary students via webcast and C-Span next Tuesday. In perhaps the most over-the-top performance, state Republican Chairman Jim Greer called it an attempt to use "our children to spread liberal propaganda" and "President...

Catch the video before Big Brother catches you.

What’s next in surveillance-happy Britain? Cameras in private homes? Actually, yes. To passing tourists, catching yet another government poster apprising you of electronic surveillance looming in the distance, the initials “CCTV” can be oddly reminiscent of “CCCP,” the Cyrillicized abbreviation for the U.S.S.R. CCTV is the United Kingdom’s ubiquitous acronym. Nobody needs to be told what it stands for. It accompanies you as you make your way to work, whether by car, bus, train, or taxi. And it’s there waiting for you at the end of your shift, as you go to buy your groceries or head to the movies....

Security: A Senate bill lets the president "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "nongovernmental" computer networks and do what's needed to respond to the threat. Didn't they just collect our e-mail addresses?We wish this was just a piece of the fictional "Dr. Strangelove" that fell to the cutting-room floor, but it's not. It is a real piece of disturbingly vague legislation sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Senate Bill 773 would grant the administration emergency powers (where have we heard that before?) in the event of a cyberemergency that the president would have...

This is the Obama Big Brother Zero 'dollar' (it is not a real dollar). It is political artwork that is roughly the same size as currency so that you can carry it easily in a wallet and have handy for reference or to give to someone, or to leave somewhere for another to find and take. Front of the bill first, then the back. For the whole series of Zero dollar bills, go here: "Flickr Zero Bill Archive"