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Officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are conducting a massive, NSA-esque data-mining project collecting account information on an estimated 991 million American credit card accounts. It was also learned at a Congressional hearing Tuesday that CFPB officials are working with the Federal Housing Finance Agency on a second data-mining effort, this one focused on the 53 million residential mortgages taken out by Americans since 1998.

How’s that Obama Smart Meter working out for you? Are you sleeping better at night? Do you get to follow your energy usage minute by minute if you have enough strength left to get out of bed after being essentially microwaved 24/7? Have you driven by Florida Power and Light’s big “Data Mining Center” right across the street from its Next Era, Next Gen power complex in Jupiter-Juno Beach? With all of the money FP&L stands to gain from its huge rate hikes proposed at the Florida Public Service Commission hearing on January 7, maybe they’ll even be able to...

The world's two largest custody banks, BNY Mellon Corp and State Street Corp, are loading up on engineers to crunch mountains of data into juicy chunks of information that they can use to win more customers and generate more fees. The shift in hiring strategy comes as the cost of computing power, data storage and bandwidth plunges, giving the U.S. banks more opportunities to capitalize on information about customers that include the world's largest hedge, mutual and pension funds. "At State Street this year, we've hired more engineers than MBAs," said John Klinck, the bank's head of global strategy and...

The $126 million genetic-testing company can tell you how to live smarter, better, and longer. It can also tell you what might kill you. You can purchase 14 gallons of organic milk or 396 lollipops. You can give her 33 rides on the Ferris wheel at the state fair, or you can get him a couple of violin lessons. You could put the money in a savings account, you could buy her her very own LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer digital learning tablet, or you could buy enough pizzas to feed all of her friends on the block. So many options, so...

It is becoming increasingly obvious that Common Core controversy is a fight largely between concerned citizens and parents on one side, with Big Business, Big Government, and a cadre of establishment billionaires like Bill Gates on the other. Common Core: People vs. Big Government, Big Business, and Billionaires The New American 01 November 2013 === Related articles: Common Core: A Scheme to Rewrite Education Orwellian Nightmare: Data-mining Your Kids Under Pressure, Largest N.H. School District Looks Beyond Common Core Common Core National Education Outrages Teacher Coalition At Wisconsin Hearing, Educators Blast Common Core Education Educators Expose Dangers of Common...

The fiscal 2014 budget justification released by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner explains that CMS is requesting that Congress appropriate $803.5 million for operations and management of the Obamacare exchanges during the fiscal year so that, among other things, CMS can “ensure the integrity of programs that redistribute tens of billions of dollars.” Overall, CMS wants $2 billion to run what it calls the “Federal Marketplace” for health insurance. “CMS’ program level request for the Marketplaces totals $2.0 billion in FY 2014, to support the first year of program operations,” says the budget justification. The agency...

We now know that millions of people will lose their existing health-insurance policies thanks to Obamacare. Already hundreds of thousands of people have gotten letters from their insurance companies letting them know they’ll lose their coverage. Millions more are bound to get similar letters, particularly when the small-business mandate kicks in. They should also get another letter, however. And that letter should come from the GOP, either from Reince Priebus or, better, from their local GOP representative, senator, governor or whichever local politician makes the most sense. And that letter should, without stridency, hyperbole or annoying appeals for money, explain...

ACT Inc. announced today that it is developing a new series of assessments for every grade level, from 3rd through 10th, to measure skills needed in college and careers. The tests, which would be administered digitally and provide instant feedback to teachers, will be piloted in states this fall and scheduled to be launched in 2014, says Jon Erickson, the president of education for ACT, the Iowa City, Iowa-based nonprofit testing company. The "next generation" assessment will be pegged to the Common Core State Standards and cover the four areas now on the ACT: English, reading, math, and science. "It...

While the nation’s political class has been fixated on the government shutdown in Washington this week, the National Security Agency (NSA) has continued to spy on all Americans and, by its ambiguity and shrewd silence, seems to be acknowledging slowly that the scope of its spying is truly breathtaking. The Obama administration is of the view that the NSA can spy on anyone, anywhere. The president thinks that federal statutes enable the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to authorize the NSA to capture any information it desires about any persons without identifying the persons and without a showing...

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.” – Philip K. Dick, author of Minority Report On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes...

Since rumors began to spread that a startup called Palantir helped to kill Osama bin Laden, Alex Karp hasn’t had much time to himself. On one sun-baked July morning in Silicon Valley Palantir’s lean 45-year-old chief executive, with a top-heavy mop of frazzled hair, hikes the grassy hills around Stanford University’s massive satellite antennae known as the Dish, a favorite meditative pastime. But his solitude is disturbed somewhat by “Mike,” an ex-Marine–silent, 6 foot 1, 270 pounds of mostly pectoral muscle–who trails him everywhere he goes. Even on the suburban streets of Palo Alto, steps from Palantir’s headquarters, the bodyguard...

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

The chief judge of America’s most powerful secret court is a 64-year-old man who has said his path toward the law began in part when he was stopped by police in the early 1960s simply for being black, and who once said he became a lawyer to “make an impact on the quality of life for people of color in this country.” Reggie Walton is the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose 11 members are appointed directly by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Revelations of broad spying by the National Security Agency have drawn unusual...

As EAGnews reported previously, the data compiled through Common Core will yield all sorts of non-education related information about students for bureaucrats: family income, religious affiliation, discipline problems, number of hours worked per weekend, medical laboratory procedure results, amount of non-school activity involvement and computer screen name. How would voters react if they knew an aspect of Common Core is to collect this sort of information on kindergarteners?

President Barack Obama defended top secret National Security Agency spying programs as legal in a lengthy interview Monday, and called them transparent—even though they are authorized in secret. “It is transparent,” Obama told PBS’ Charlie Rose in an interview broadcast Monday. “That’s why we set up the FISA court,” he added, referring to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes two recently disclosed programs: one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism. He added that he’s...

What was it that I was saying earlier this week about the intelligence-industrial complex? Bloomberg reported last night that Edward Snowden may have only scratched the surface on the cooperation between American intelligence agencies and commercial firms. In fact, the partnership is much wider than first thought — and the intel agencies provide their partners with some significant quid pro quo:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the...

Some months back, a young entrepreneur of Indian origin co-founded a company that, to oversimplify its expertise, reads your mind. Moninder Jheeta's Silicon Valley-based Expect Labs has introduced an app that can listen to an eight-person conversation, a virtual babble, glean sense from it, and suggest information that speakers may want to see or pursue — even as they are conversing. Jheeta, who is the chief technology officer of Expect, calls it "anticipatory computing". In time, the app can reside in devices ranging from your cell phone to your refrigerator to your car, instantly and constantly crunching data it gathers...

The National Security Agency (NSA) is obtaining a complete set of users' phone records from Verizon by means of a secret court order under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), so reports the UK Guardian. We are assured by President Obama that no one is actually listening to the calls. This is being overseen by the FISA court, you see. That would be the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court overseeing a program to gather data about domestic phone calls. But the kind of data being collected by the government is just metadata, and so nothing to worry about....

Monitoring hundreds of millions of phone records is an extraordinary invasion of privacy. When Americans expressed outrage last week over the seizure and surveillance of Verizon's client data by the National Security Agency, President Obama responded: "In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother . . . but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance." How many records did the NSA seize from Verizon? Hundreds of millions. We are now learning about more potential mass data collections by the government from other communications and online companies. These are the "details," and few...

Update: Data-mining goes deeper than thought? It’s not just the number of requests, it’s the scope of them. They’re not demanding records related to particular investigations anymore, they’re demanding huge troves of records on random Americans for data-mining purposes, the same thing Patriot Act co-author Jim Sensenbrenner complained about a few days ago but somehow didn’t foresee in 2001.