Free Republic

The National Science Foundation (NSF) project designed to track “misinformation” on Twitter has removed portions of its website that monitored political users, including conservatives who used the “tcot” hashtag. “Truthy,” the nearly $1 million research project being conducted by the University of Indiana, has redesigned its website following the Washington Free Beacon’s initial report on the study. Truthy Removes Part of Website That Monitored Conservative Hashtags Free Beacon prohibited from asking further questions about project The service is intended to monitor “suspicious memes” and “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online. Truthy has received increased...

The collapse of XP support by Microsoft has led to a proliferation of disruptive internet advertising. These "SmarterPower" thugs are wrecking my FR access. Is this a plot? How do does one keep these ani off one's computer? They "pop-up" at every keystroke. And they have sound!Who needs this? Why pay an ISP or a cable company if they are selling us to every internet advertiser. Of course, the main issue is security and KGB-like surveillance by the Alinskyites. WTF are these people?

August 27, 2014By Terence P. Jeffrey The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Department of Transportation, published last week an "advanced notice of proposed rulemaking" on "vehicle-to-vehicle communications." What NHTSA is proposing could begin a transformation in the American transportation system that makes our lives better and freer — or gives government more power over where we go and when. In announcing its proposed rulemaking, NHTSA is stressing its intention to protect the "privacy" of American drivers. "This document initiates rulemaking that would propose to create a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, FMVSS No. 150, to require...

Remember that scene in Minority Report, where Tom Cruise is on the run from the law, but is unable to avoid detection because everywhere he goes there are constant retina scans feeding his location back to a central database? That’s tomorrow. Today, Google is tracking wherever your smartphone goes, and putting a neat red dot on a map to mark the occasion. You can find that map here. All you need to do is log in with the same account you use on your phone, and the record of everywhere you’ve been for the last day to month will erupt...

A new kind of tracking tool, canvas fingerprinting, is being used to follow visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn. First documented in a forthcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it. Like other tracking tools, canvas fingerprints are used to build profiles of users based on the websites...

There's triple trouble with electronic health records: patient safety, medical privacy, and data security. And there are at least eight hazards. But much taxpayer money has been thrown at the highly speculative, untested EHR for political and profit purposes. And there are at least eight hazards. But much taxpayer money has been thrown at the highly speculative, untested EHR for political and profit purposes. England has already tried and failed. The National Health Service, which serves a population of 53 million, began building a national EHR system in 2002. By 2007, it missed key deadlines. In 2011, the $20 billion...

DOJ requesting $2 million for ‘Gun Safety Technology’ grants Attorney General Eric Holder said on Friday that gun tracking bracelets are something the Justice Department (DOJ) wants to “explore” as part of its gun control efforts. When discussing gun violence prevention programs within the DOJ, Holder told a House appropriations subcommittee that his agency is looking into technological innovations. “I think that one of the things that we learned when we were trying to get passed those common sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I had a meeting with a group of technology people and we talked about...

“[A security camera] doesn’t respond to complaint, threats, or insults. Instead, it just watches you in a forbidding manner. Today, the surveillance state is so deeply enmeshed in our data devices that we don’t even scream back because technology companies have convinced us that we need to be connected to them to be happy.” — Pratap Chatterjee, journalist What is most striking about the American police state is not the mega-corporations running amok in the halls of Congress, the militarized police crashing through doors and shooting unarmed citizens, or the invasive surveillance regime which has come to dominate every aspect...

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence...

The end could be near for cookies, the tiny pieces of code that marketers deploy on Web browsers to track people's online movements, serve targeted advertising and amass valuable user profiles. The moves could radically shift the balance of power in the $120 billion global digital advertising industry—and have ad technology companies scrambling to figure out their next play. * On Wednesday, Microsoft quietly announced in a blog post that the company will give marketers the ability to track and advertise to people who use apps on its Windows 8 and 8.1 operating system on tablets and PCs. The company...

There are nine key take-aways: 1. Many Americans are in at least one state government patient-tracking system, either as a patient or as a parent. 2. There are virtually no consent requirements and few dissent options. 3. Child Health Profiles are being created by linking various state databases together. 4. Federal funding drives the establishment and maintenance of state databases. 5. This is a violation of Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizure. 6. Disease- and condition-specific databases are increasing. 7. Patient trust in doctors and hospitals may be harmed once patients realize surveillance is taking place. 8. The HIPAA...

Whether it’s companies tracking your user habits, or the government tracking your calls, chances are you are being tracked one way or another. Take a look at seven ways you’re being tracked in the modern world.7. Surveillance Cameras and Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV)They’re absolutely everywhere. From speeding cameras, red-light cameras at intersections, and even entire surveillance networks dedicated to detecting suspicious activity, monitoring devices are watching us. In the case of New York City, the surveillance technology is so advanced that abandoned packages and bags are flagged immediately. The technology now even allows the cameras to lock onto particular subjects wearing...

At a time when your ISP is tracking your online activities, sites you visit are doing the same (even the one you do not visit are able to track you), Google is not to be left out in the game, and the NSA is tracking everybody else, it’s easy to be depressed. What exactly don’t these guys know about you? Or what can’t they know about you? For most people, the shocking answer, is not much. You see, privacy died about 10 years ago. There are things you can do to regain some semblance of privacy in your life, but...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong. Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases....

The Justice Department temporarily lost track of two former terrorists who had participated in its witness protection program and until recently did not disclose the fictitious identities it created for terrorism-linked witnesses to the agency that generates watch lists, allowing some who were on the no-fly list to take commercial flights under their new names, according to a new report. A public summary of the classified report, issued Thursday by the office of the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael Horowitz, revealed that the internal watchdog raised alarms with senior department officials in early 2012 about how the witness protection...

Minneapolis Police (as well as many other departments) use automated license plate readers to log millions of times, dates, and locations of cars every month. They know where you were, and they keep this data as long as they want. A proposed law, House File 474 (and Senate companion SF385), would force police departments to immediately delete data on non-suspect cars (like yours). This bill is scheduled for a vote Friday (today)in the House. If you think that the police shouldn't track the every move of innocent citizens, ask your state senator representative to support HF474/SF385.

Tracking is a favorite federal activity. Two bills in Congress would create prescription-tracking systems, ostensibly to identify and locate counterfeit drugs: a bipartisan 85-page House bill and a bipartisan 107-page Senate bill. The Senate bill would track every unit of every medication. Bloomberg's BNA report calls it a "National Drug Track-and-Trace System." Every transaction, every change in ownership would have to be reported to the electronic federal tracking system. According to its authors, the Senate bill would replace a "patchwork of state product tracing laws with a strong, uniform standard that would ultimately result in electronic, interoperable unit level product...

The Internal Revenue Service is collecting a lot more than taxes this year--it's also acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers' digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records, as it expands its search for tax cheats to places it's never gone before.

While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families. Say goodbye to your children's privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It's yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of "Common Core." As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core's technological project is "merely...

I'm looking for a good basic cell phone. I have an Aspergers son who needs a phone for safety purposes, but I don't want him to have texting, email or internet access with it. Believe me, that would be a major mistake. Where can someone obtain an inexpensive, basic cell phone plan. I'd like to be able to restrict calls to selected numbers. An added bonus would be if I could track his location.