Free Republic

The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T. While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003...

Three months ago, Harvard student Aran Khanna was preparing to start a coveted internship at Facebook when he launched a browser application from his dorm room that angered the social media behemoth. His application, called Marauder’s Map — a clever name that Harry Potter fans will appreciate — was a Chrome extension that used data from Facebook Messenger to map where users were when they sent messages. The app also showed the locations, which were accurate to within three feet, in a group chat with people he barely knew. That meant complete strangers could hypothetically see that he had messaged...

A work in progress. I am willing to take some intelligent suggestions and additions. Litany for the conversion of internet thugs. (private use only, and when truly irritated, and when the alternative is foul language) Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Christ, hear us. Christ, graciously hear us. God, the Father of Heaven, have mercy on us. God, the Son, Redeemer of the World, have mercy on us. God, the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us. Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us. Lest internet thugs be eternally tormented by all the fiends of hell, convert...

Over a year ago former director of both the NSA and CIA, Michael Hayden, flat out admitted, "we kill people based on metadata." He quickly distinguished between the metadata about which the debate was focused, telephone records, and other forms of surveillance metadata upon which covert actions are taken. Not surprised about the actions, I confess I was taken aback when I considered the implications that this disclosure has on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in cyberspace. Ever since the USA-Patriot Act in 2001, I have been harping on complications of the Fourth Amendment between content and metadata in data networking. For...

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- The dream of a free and open Internet is slowly being killed by overregulation, censorship and bad laws that don't stop the right people, a top computer crime defense lawyer says.

Until a few days ago, Dr. Walter Palmer was just a successful dentist from Minnesota who had a passion for trophy hunting; a highly regulated and extremely expensive sport. His most recent hunt took him to Zimbabwe, where he shot a male lion during a hunt with a licensed hunting guide. It was only when word of Palmer’s hunting success spread that the dentist discovered just how quickly and completely the Internet can be used to destroy a person. Overnight, Palmer’s prey, a lion dubbed “Cecil” by local Zimbabweans, became the latest Internet celebrity victim and Palmer the most recent...

A year away from a historic transition affecting the digital landscape, the head of the organization that regulates Web addresses warns that much still needs to be done to keep the Internet intact, regardless of whether the U.S. relinquishes its oversight as expected. “New mechanisms, new methods of governance, need to be created, and we are yet to figure them out,” Fadi Chehade, CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, told The Washington Times in a recent interview. “If we don’t figure this out, in my opinion, in the next two to three years, we are going...

AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile users across the country, but especially in the Southeast reported outages Tuesday afternoon, with reports coming in from California, the midwest U.S. and the Chattanooga region. Though some users reported that their phones displayed several bars of signal strength, they were still unable to complete calls or use mobile data. AT&T's outages appeared to be concentrated in Kentucky, Tennessee and North Georgia, with other scattered outages appearing from coast to coast, with T-Mobile users losing service in Huntsville, Alabama, and Louisville, Kentucky.

An AT&T outage has left thousands of users without access to the internet and phone services. The outages have been reported in the Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville areas in Tennessee. Outages are also reported in Huntsville, AL, and Lexington and Louisville, KY. In Nashville, the Metro Nashville Police Department and the Nashville Fire Department are without internet service. An AT&T outage has impacted several areas in the eastern United States. An AT&T outage has impacted several areas in the eastern United States. NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) - An AT&T outage has left thousands of users without access to the internet and...

Financial companies are facing extortion threats from hackers who threaten to knock their websites offline unless firms pay tens of thousands of dollars, an FBI agent told MarketWatch Thursday. More than 100 companies, including targets from big banks to brokerages in the financial sector, have received distributed denial of service threats since about April, says Richard Jacobs, assistant special agency in charge of the cyber branch at the FBI’s New York office. With these types of attacks, known as DDoS, criminals jam websites by flooding them with useless traffic. The ransom requests typically run in the tens of thousands of...

Last last week, a neologism was born. Twitter was the incubator. "Cuckservative," a portmanteau of "conservative" and "cuckold" (i.e. a man whose wife has cheated on him) burned up Twitter as fans of Donald Trump's politicking warred with the movement conservatives who opposed it. RedState.com's Erick Erickson, the Daily Caller's Matt Lewis, and the team at the well-read conservative blog Ace of Spades were among the critics suddenly deluged with accusations of cuckservatism. Below, we explain.

SHANGHAI—As social media helped topple regimes in the Middle East and northern Africa, a senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army publicly warned that an Internet dominated by the U.S. threatened to overthrow China’s Communist Party. Ye Zheng and a Chinese researcher, writing in the state-run China Youth Daily, said the Internet represented a new form of global control, and the U.S. was a “shadow” present during some of those popular uprisings. Beijing had better pay attention. Four years after they sounded that alarm, China is paying a lot of attention. Its government is pushing to rewrite the rules of...

Republicans in the Senate are leading efforts to pass legislation that would allow the states to impose a sales tax on online transactions. Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) has proposed the Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA), which would allow states to "collect and remit sales and use taxes with respect to remote sales.” The bill includes an exemption for companies whose gross remote sales are less than $1 million per year. The legislation enjoys support particularly among legislators in rural states who believe that online retailers are encroaching on sales made out of traditional storefronts. […] This is not the first time...

On July 15 in Durant, Oklahoma, President Obama announced ConnectHome, describing it as: … a new initiative with communities, the private sector, and federal government to expand high speed broadband to more families across the country. ConnectHome is aimed at low-income areas with little broadband uptake, expanding several earlier federal programs. The headlines are about connecting the poor to the modern convenience of the internet, but they don’t mention who’s paying for it. As with most federal programs, you are. Is ConnectHome worth the costs, and what are they? So far, the ConnectHome website is thin on details. (It’s even...

If you talk to the reporters who work for various big media companies, they insist that they have true editorial independence from the business side of their companies. They insist that the news coverage isn't designed to reflect the business interests of their owners. Of course, most people have always suspected this was bullshit -- and you could see evidence of this in things like the fact that the big TV networks refused to cover the SOPA protests. But -- until now -- there's never necessarily been a smoking gun with evidence of how such business interests influences the editorial...

Typically when referring to electrical current, an image of electrons moving through a metallic wire is conjured. Using the spin Seebeck effect (SSE), it is possible to create a current of pure spin (a quantum property of electrons related to its magnetic moment) in magnetic insulators. However, this work demonstrates that the SSE is not limited to magnetic insulators but also occurs in a class of materials known as paramagnets. Since magnetic moments within paramagnets do not interact with each other like in conventional ferromagnets, and thus do not hold their magnetization when an external magnetic field is removed, this...

“Abdulazeez did what jihadists are asked to do prior to execution of their attacks: delete important information that could provide insight into their networks.” And now his network is no doubt enjoying the spectacle as law enforcement officials and the mainstream media continue their quest to discover his motive. “Information about the Chattanooga Shooter is Disappearing from the Internet,” by Rita Katz, SITE Intel Group, July 23, 2015: A week after Chattanooga shooter Mohammad Abdulazeez’s attack, very little is known about his motives, path to radicalization, and network of affiliations. Immediately after the attack, Islamic State (IS) fighters and supporters...

The prolonged hacking into the White House Office of Personnel Management, which put the personal information of at least some 21.5 million past and current federal employees in jeopardy, is only the beginning of the security threat to the Obama Administration and its successors, a number of top-level experts in cybersecurity have told Fox News. The attack has been frequently sourced as coming from China. The experts warned that the entire U.S. national security clearance system could be compromised, that future senior government leaders and advisors could be targeted even before taking office, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of government officials...

The fist bump was their thing in Afghanistan, where both Marines lost legs in the same attack, and the fist bump is still their thing in the hunt for child predators under a special law enforcement program to train and hire medically retired veterans. Cpl. Justin Gaertner and Sgt. Gabriel Martinez in their dress blues bumped fists at an event earlier this year in Florida, just as they bumped fists while recovering from their wounds. Gaertner, 26, of Tampa, Fla., has been partnered for the last two years with retired Army Special Forces Staff Sgt. Nathan Cruz, 42, executing the...

What’s the only thing faster than a Lamborghini? Twitter. Putting pedal to the medal, the site has been gaslighting the outrage of millions over the barbarity of Planned Parenthood. This morning, the Internet erupted at a new Center for Medical Progress video revealing Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter haggling over aborted baby limbs. In the clip, the top abortion officer says she’s eager to make the sale at a good price, because “I want a Lamborghini.”