Free Republic

For more than 100 years, the FBI has been collecting crime data from local police departments across the country through the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which has been the gold standard of national crime statistics.By 2020, almost every law enforcement agency was included in the FBI’s database. Some agencies reported topline numbers, such as the total number of murders or car thefts, through the Summary Reporting System. Others reported granular incident data with details about each reported crime through the newer National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Then it all changed in 2021. In an effort to fully modernize the system,...

Below, I provide excerpts and comments from California's Department of Justice reports on crimes for years 2022, 2023, and then a portion of a Crimes and Clearances report updated in June 2024 (covers 2021 to 2023)As I look at crime statistics in California, I find perplexing discrepancies in reporting, with some sources claiming crime is decreasing and others claiming that crime is increasing. With our borders wide open, urging migrants to flood the US, decriminalization etc., I would expect to see an increase in crime stats. But in some cases, reports of crime are decreasing, and perhaps that's largely due...

Nearly every American's Social Security number may have been leaked, with a hacking group claiming they stole nearly 3 billion records of personal information. A massive database containing over 2.7 billion records has reportedly ended up on a criminal forum. These records belong to individuals in the U.S. and were allegedly stolen from National Public Data (NPD). While the accuracy of the leaked data could not be verified, the hackers reportedly obtained sensitive information such as names, mailing addresses and Social Security numbers. The scale of this breach is so vast that if you live in the U.S., it's likely...

bout four months after a notorious hacking group claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information from a major data broker, a member of the group has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen personal data. The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Information Research Group.

ransomnote: I copied about 80% of the Justice.gov FOIA Library page (below). About 20% or less of the page is formatted in a way that I can't copy. Anything on the webpage which uses formatted graphics to look like a tab, menu or box did not copy. FOIA LibrarySubscribe for Email UpdatesOIP processes FOIA requests for records of the Office of the Attorney General, Office of the Deputy Attorney General, Office of the Associate Attorney General, Office of Legal Policy, Office of Legislative Affairs, Office Public Affairs, and Office of Information Policy.OIP posts records from these Offices in this FOIA...

If we’ve learned anything from our national COVID experience, it’s that science is not a collection of fixed, eternal declarations. Tools and terminology useful in the process of discovery can also be instruments of confirmation. A microscope can be a portal to the unexpected, or a prop in a theatrical performance. True crime documentaries and news reports of deaths often feature a statement such as, “toxicology was performed,” “toxicology is pending,” or “toxicology showed X, Y and Z.” The word, “toxicology,” has an aura of a thorough, definitive procedure. Typically, “toxicology” is understood as analogous to drug screening the living,...

AT&T has announced that the company believes a hacker stole records of calls and texts from nearly all of AT&T's wireless customers, according to a financial filing from the company. "The data does not contain the content of calls or texts, personal information such as Social Security numbers, dates of birth, or other personally identifiable information," AT&T said in their statement released early Friday morning. "These records identify the telephone numbers with which an AT&T or MVNO wireless number interacted during these periods, including telephone numbers of AT&T wireline customers and customers of other carriers, counts of those interactions, and...

AT&T suffered a massive data breach that saw data from 'nearly all' of its customers' accounts illegally downloaded, the company has confirmed. The compromised data included records of calls and texts of wireless subscribers and landline customers over a five month period in 2022. AT&T listed it had 110 million wireless customers that year, which would make this hack one of the biggest breaches of private communications data in recent history. Although the exposed data did not include customer names, there are 'publicly available online tools' capable of connecting numbers with people's identities, the company said. AT&T admitted it had...

I was just notified by CreditKarma that The Post Millennial [thepostmillennial.com] had a data breach that shared my personal information: The Post Millennial breach Reported on May 2024 In May 2024, The Post Millennial's database was allegedly breached. Even if you don't use your The Post Millennial account anymore, it's important to protect any info that was exposed.

We've all heard before that our cellphones are listening to us and monitoring our every move. While this has been debunked (or, at least, explained), the fact of the matter is that data tracking is standard practice by the most popular mobile carriers these days. **SNIP** If you don't want your mobile carrier to have so much overarching access to your data, there are ways you can stop them. The problem is that most mobile carriers aren't going to broadcast this information because it's beneficial for them to maintain this access. However, that's why we're here to help. Managing your...

Credential theft is a significant factor in breaches, resulting in 38% of all incidents. Phishing is another route into the enterprise, being associated with 15% of all breaches. The most frequently used entry point for phishing is Web applications, followed by email.The report, which analyses 20,358 security incidents and 10,626 confirmed breaches offered by third-party contributors including the US Secret Service and dozens of other organizations and companies; publicly-known data breaches; and security events mitigated by its own Verizon Threat Research Advisory Center (VTRAC), emphasised the critical role the human element plays in introducing risk into the equation.

A recent analysis published by the left-leaning Brookings Institution -- which highlights Pew data -- demonstrates significant erosion within Joe Biden's 2020 victory coalition, across multiple key demographics. It cites "major shifts away from Biden have occurred among Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters. Surprisingly, Trump appears to have gained more ground among college-educated Black and Hispanic voters than with less educated members of these groups. Equally surprising: Up to now, Trump has increased his support more among women than men." All survey data should be considered with a large grain of salt with half a year still remaining before the...

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Weihua Li, a data reporter for The Marshall Project, on the FBI's new and incomplete crime report and consequences for the public. MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Crime is a huge topic in elections this November, and the FBI has now entered the chat. It has just released the Crime in the Nation report for 2021. But the bureau switched the way it collects crime data this year, and many police departments did not get on board. Los Angeles and New York City did not report to the FBI. In fact, only 63% of the...

Being proved right isn't always fun. Just weeks after my warning in the March issue that our modern high-tech cars are tracking us and sharing data with manufacturers, cops, and parties unknown, came a report of soaring auto insurance premiums because of snitching vehicles. The consequences get worse from there. Fortunately, there are ways to keep your snoopy ride from contacting the mothership. Your Driving History May Be Transmitted and Stored "Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry," Kashmir Hill reported this month for The New York Times. "Sometimes this is happening...

G.M. had provided information about braking, acceleration and speed to LexisNexis Risk Solution and Verisk, firms that generated driver risk profiles for insurers... General Motors said Friday that it had stopped sharing details about how people drove its cars with two data brokers that created risk profiles for the insurance industry. The decision followed a New York Times report this month that G.M. had, for years, been sharing data about drivers’ mileage, braking, acceleration and speed with the insurance industry. The drivers were enrolled — some unknowingly, they said — in OnStar Smart Driver, a feature in G.M.’s internet-connected cars...

This past Friday, Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the Democrat Majority Leader, and a Jew in the state with the largest Jewish population in this nation, called for the removal of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though this is interference in democratic Israeli politics, the most disturbing aspect is the idea that underlies this demand. Earlier, President Joe Biden indicated that it was time for him to have a “come to Jesus” moment with Netanyahu. Though it's quite insulting to use this phrase with the Jewish leader of the Jewish State, again the most troubling aspect is the implication...

I drive an older car--a Lexus LS430 from 2005, so I can rest assured of two things: an amazingly comfortable ride and that the tech in my vehicle is way too old to collect data to be sold online. You, however, may not be so lucky. Some late-model cars are secretly collecting data on your driving habits, and selling the results for profit. Full Story: https://t.co/2vmg92Q3Yw— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) March 13, 2024Not only is this practice super creepy, but it could be costing you money and, if what I suspect is the case, giving the government a window into your...

The latest hot spots in commercial real estate aren’t in Manhattan or Miami. Instead of snazzy hotels or glistening office towers, the new property darlings are power-hungry data centers, often in places like Northern Virginia; Columbus, Ohio; and Salt Lake City. Traditionally box style, these buildings are all about function: A place for racks and racks of computers to be stacked up high, kept cool, and girded for the boundless stream of images, videos, chats, text, internet searches and the digital detritus of our lives. Their goal isn’t merely to contain, host and sort data billowing from computers and smart...

“There are three kinds of lies,” Mark Twain famously observed. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” You already know that the government's published statistics are not trustworthy. Federal agencies have shifted methodologies over the years, making it hard to compare data sets. In economic modeling, there is a concept called “GIGO” — garbage in, garbage out. And what we have been seeing does seem like a lot of garbage. Then, the number-crunchers perform adjustments, do other kinds of syntheses, and make revisions to that data. A good case could be made that government data has been politicized, too, and some methodologies...

a, Dual-beam configuration for super-resolution writing and reading. b, Spin-coating process for material addition, material diffusion and blank-disk molding. c, The capacity of a single 3D nanoscale disk is approximately equivalent to that of a petabit-level Blu-ray library or an HDD data array. Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06980-y ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A team of photonic engineers affiliated with several institutions in China has developed a new type of optical DVD that is capable of holding up to a petabyte of data. The group used a new material to coat the DVDs and new laser techniques to write data. The results are published...