Free Republic

I have been wondering about a couple of things. First, Faraday cages protect electronics within them from EMPs, right? So would the metal body of a car act as a Faraday cage and protect the electronics within the car? And I was also wondering... there is a foil-lined envelope I can keep my credit card in to prevent a passerby with a special machine from stealing the info... I wondered if a similar envelope could protect my phone from being located all the time? And maybe that would also protect the phone from EMPs? Note: I am not going anywhere...

TikTok users are sharing ways in which they surveil their romantic partners over concerns of infidelity, raising serious ethical questions about technology and dating in the modern era. A video posted to the app earlier this month appears to show just how pervasive such surveillance has become, sparking widespread debate on a range of issues such as trust and boundaries. The video, which has been viewed more than 740,000 times, details how TikTok user @thearmanim allegedly attempted to obtain an ex-boyfriend’s cell phone messages by contacting his service provider.... ...Others began sharing techniques that they claimed allowed them to keep...

Johnny Lin, a former Apple engineer and co-founder of the software company Lockdown Privacy says Apple's "Ask App Not To Track" button is a "dud" that gives users "a false sense of privacy," according to a Washington Post report. Even if users request apps not to collect their activity across other companies' apps and websites, popular iPhone apps like Subway Surfers still collect personal data, a new study by Lockdown Privacy determined. "We found that App Tracking Transparency made no difference...

In 2008, in the midst of our financial meltdown, future-Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel infamously proclaimed: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” Following Rahm Emanuel’s playbook today, Big Tech is attempting to capitalize on the coronavirus, the Wuhan-originated pandemic which may cause the biggest public-health and financial crisis we’ve ever faced, by making wholly unrelated demands for: (1) blanket amnesty from antitrust laws; and (2) continued coddling by Uncle Sam (since 1996) in the form of the...

Every day, hundreds of millions of Americans look forward to the treasure troves of digital content deposited on the World Wide Web. But these new and novel offerings are regularly compromised by online piracy, which makes it exceedingly difficult for content creators to earn their due. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center, this wanton theft costs the U.S. economy more than $29 billion per year in lost revenue. As the Senate deliberates on strategies to combat online piracy both at home and abroad, lawmakers must bear in mind the immense benefits that intellectual property (IP)...

Money, violence, indiscretion: the motivation for any person who wants to disappear, either physically or digitally, usually wends back to one of these. Whatever the reason and whatever the scale of the ambition – from starting a new life in a foreign country to scrubbing one’s name and address from the phonebook – it has never been harder to vanish. In a world where almost any action outside your garden shed leaves some kind of digital footprint, there is no clear path back to the realm of the unknown.

Some Thoughts on Privacy - God Is Watching (And so Are Many Others) Msgr. Charles Pope • May 5, 2016 • 0 Comments At the bottom of this post is a 2010 CBS news story reporting hat anything you’ve copied on a digital copier going back years is stored on a hard drive inside the copier. These drives are evidently so large that they can store more than 20,000 documents and hundreds of thousands of pages.Hence if you have ever photocopied personal materials (e.g., social security numbers, checking info, personal data) it is likely on that hard drive. The...

Public fear is an ally of big government. When fear sets in among the populace -- often with encouragement from self-interested politicians -- the result is usually an expansion of governmental power and a loss of individual rights. Politicians typically stoke fear by exaggerating some perceived threat or by inventing one out of whole cloth. They then declare that government alone can provide the answer. Take the demonization of a recent move led by Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., to undo last-minute Obama-era rules from the Federal Communications Commission regulating online privacy. The rules exempted powerful...

Millennials live on the Internet. We were born and raised surfing the web, using Snapchat and Instagram and, of course, playing games online. It is almost a birthright. Keeping the Internet free and clear of oppressive federal government red-tape and regulations is critical to keep innovation and growth in this space. Some on the left see the web as the “wild west” that needs the guiding hand of government. A former commissioner of the Federal Elections Commission has repeatedly argued for federal control over the web. Ann Ravel, and others like her, want websites like the Drudge Report, YouTube and...

Last Tuesday, the House of Representatives, despite my opposition, approved S.J. Res. 34, “A joint resolution providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to "Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services.”This resolution will overturn internet privacy rules established by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on October 27, 2016. I voted ‘No’ on this joint resolution but it passed nonetheless by a narrow margin of 215-205. I am writing to share with you my views and why I voted against this resolution....

Breitbart News spoke with Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment, about his organization’s opposition to the FCC’s broadband privacy rule. Kerpen told Breitbart News that the criticism against removing this regulation is unwarranted. “This is a deliberate disinformation campaign from the usual suspects from the tech-left and the media, and they’re completely misrepresenting the issue, and the conservatives are falling for the fake news narrative,” he told Breitbart News. “Up until 2015, the FTC protected consumer privacy, and then the FCC Net Neutrality order eviscerated the consumer protections at the FTC by pre-empting FTC’s jurisdiction. The FCC then came around...

The Senate voted to kill Obama-era online privacy regulations, a first step toward allowing internet providers such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to sell your browsing habits and other personal information as they expand their own online ad businesses. Those rules, not yet in effect, would have required internet providers to ask your permission before sharing your personal information.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) -- Comcast Cable Communications has given a northern Illinois politician the identity of an Internet service subscriber whose account was used to post an anonymous comment online suggesting the politician molests children.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday said a controversial new surveillance bill could sweep away “important privacy protections”, a move that bodes ill for the measure’s return to the floor of the Senate this week. The latest in a series of failed attempts to reform cybersecurity, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa) grants broad latitude to tech companies, data brokers and anyone with a web-based data collection to mine user information and then share it with “appropriate Federal entities”, which themselves then have permission to share it throughout the government. Minnesota senator Al Franken queried the DHS in...

+++++In his freedom-charting essay Common Sense, one of the most famous works of the revolutionary era, Thomas Paine describes government as a necessary evil in society. "For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver," wrote Paine; who concluded, "but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest." In other words, we all sacrifice a small amount of individual liberty in order to establish a governing body designed to protect liberty overall. As we...

Now you're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company, Mr. Obama. OK, maybe not Coke, but, you’ll have to answer to today’s bubbly equivalent, which can also rot you from the inside out: Facebook. Yeah. So be warned “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called President Barack Obama Wednesday night to complain about U.S. government actions that are undermining trust in the Internet,” reports Politico, “after a report that described how the National Security Agency posed as a Facebook server to inject malicious software into targets’ computers.” I wonder if Zuck’s voice broke when he talked to Obama. I wonder if...

Remember when John McAfee warned us in November that anybody who signed up to the Obamacare site might have their bank account cleaned-out by hackers? The eccentric genius and former fugitive called the government website 'a hacker's wet dream', adding that there were 'NO safeguards' that would stop someone from starting a fake Obamacare website 'for a couple hundred dollars' that could 'empty your bank account' in hours.  McAfee added unambiguously that 'It's going to happen, and it's going to happen soon... nothing in the Obamacare system safeguards against this.'  And I thought he was just trying to sell...

The Internet’s main engineers have asked the architects of Tor—networking software designed to make Web browsing private—to consider turning the technology into an Internet standard. If widely adopted, such a standard would make it easy to include the technology in consumer and business products ranging from routers to apps. This would, in turn, allow far more people to browse the Web without being identified by anyone who might be spying on Internet traffic. If the discussions bear fruit, it could lead to the second major initiative of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in response to the mass surveillance by...

"Lavabit won a victory in court and were able to get the secret court order [which led to the site's closure] unsealed. The ACLU's Chris Soghoian called it the nuclear option: The court order revealed the FBI demanded Lavabit turn over their root SSL certificate, something that would allow them to monitor the traffic of every user of the service. Lavabit offered an alternative method to tap into the single user in question but the FBI wasn't interested. Lavabit could either comply or shut down. As such, no U.S. company that relies on SSL encryption can be trusted with sensitive...

  "German Islamists Target Youth on the Internet" By Christoph Sydow 11/01/2012 "Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan." PHOTO CAPTION: "A growing community of German-speaking Islamists has developed on the Internet. Aiming to find new recruits, they glorify jihad and call for attacks on Germany. A new study warns that such online propaganda might foster a new generation of terrorists." SNIPPET: "International terrorist groups like al-Qaida recognized the importance of the Internet for recruiting new supporters early on." SNIPPET: "Intelligence services can also take advantage of the anonymity of Internet forums to deliberately plant false information or obtain insider...