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Advertising websites have the ability to obtain a sizable chunk of personal data provided by users of Healthcare.gov. Following up on a January 20 Associated Press report, a congressional analysis confirmed that in many instances, personal data collected by Healthcare.gov is shared with companies like Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and Advertising.com. The type of information acquired by these companies includes age, income, zip code, use of tobacco, and pregnancy. …

Virginia mother Gil Harrington is pushing Virginia to expand its database of DNA to include people convicted of Class 1 misdemeanors — a move she hopes will save lives. Harrington’s daughter, Morgan Dana Harrington, was a 20-year-old Virginia Tech student when she was abducted and murdered in 2009, allegedly by the same man now accused of killing University of Virginia student Hannah Graham last October.The alleged abductor, Jesse Matthew, was convicted of criminal trespassing in 2010, which means his DNA may have led prosecutors to solve Morgan’s case, which in turn means that he may have been jailed before his...

The Drug Enforcement Administration formerly maintained a secret database of Americans’ telephone calls to some foreign countries, the Justice Department revealed this week. A document filed by the department in a criminal case on Thursday revealed that the agency collected details about Americans’ calls to certain countries believed to be closely linked to drug trafficking networks. The program is different from a more well-known database maintained by the National Security Agency (NSA), though it appears similar in some respects. According to the government’s brief, the DEA tracked information about phone calls from the United States to other “designated” countries that...

The Democrats and the institutional left have a new political tool that allows them virtually to ignore moderates yet still win elections. This tool, the Catalist database, was employed in the 2012 election. That election defied conventional wisdom: Mitt Romney sought and won independent voters overwhelmingly, but still lost. If you wondered why the conventional wisdom about independents and moderates didn’t seem so wise in 2012, the answer is Catalist. Beyond winning elections, Catalist also allows the Democrats to turn the policy narrative upside down and suffer no political consequence for implementing radical policies which appeal to their base. The...

As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives -- including their Social Security numbers -- in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies. The Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau posted an April 16 Federal Register notice of an expansion of their joint National Mortgage Database Program to include personally identifiable information that reveals actual users, a reversal of previously stated policy. Sign Up for the Watchdog newsletter! FHFA will manage the database and share it with CFPB. A CFPB internal planning...

Apr 15, 2014 4:03PM ET / Politics Your Photo Could Be Included in the FBI’s New Facial Recognition Database Lucy Westcott If you're applying for a job in the near future, there's a chance you could end up on the FBI's imminent new facial recognition database alongside criminals, whether you like it or not. According to information obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the database, known as Next Generation Identification (NGI), will for the first time combine criminal and noncriminal fingerprint databases, along with records of palm prints, iris scans, and mugshots. The NGI, which sounds like Facebook mixed with...

A Columbus, Ohio, family said their children were traumatized after what was meant to be a fun trip to the National Museum of the United States Air Force ended with guns drawn on them. Alice Hill, 65, her daughter-in-law, Wendy, and two young grandchildren visited the museum on April 4 and, as they were leaving, were ordered to get out of their vehicle by military police. Hill said the officers pulled guns on the family and cuffed the adults in front of the children, according to an incident report. (snip) The family was detained for about 90 minutes as authorities...

When a hypertotalitarian banana republic takes another turn for the gigasurreal, even Elon Musk is speechless. In the most glaring example of how farcical idiocy has become the new normal, we will remind readers (especially those who do not follow us on twitter), of the following blurb from last night:

On January 24th, a Civitas Media internal memo leaked to the new media describing the newspaper conglomerate's "attempt to build state-by-state databases that list those who have the right to carry a concealed weapon." Within 24 hours Civitas Media reversed course and now, on January 26th, says the idea never was going to happen to begin with. Buckeyefirearms.org first published the "internal propriety communication," which Civitas Media director of content Jim Lawitz "distributed to content editors, managers, and producers at [Civitas Media-owned] newspapers in 12 states." Lawitz initially refused comment once the communiqué became public. However, he eventually said "[they]...

A national newspaper chain with nearly 100 publications and 1.6 million readers is considering building “state-by-state databases” on concealed weapons permit holders, according to an internal e-mail. The plan, laid out in an email from a top editor at North Carolina-based Civitas Media, could be similar to a controversial project a New York state newspaper carried out in 2012 which included an online map that identified gun owners in two counties by name and address. Civitas' database project was detailed the plan in a Jan. 19 e-mail to newsrooms in 11 states, including Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

The United States Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) on its face isn’t alarming. I’m not even sure if this database is official or operational but people tracking crime isn’t new, nor is suspect. You should note that this database tracks non-violent “far-right”crime as well. What I do find alarming, albeit par for the course, is the keywords under which this database article is searchable: Keywords Al Qaeda related crimes, database construction, domestic terrorism, extremist crime, far-right crime, political violence The investigator of this University of Maryland project (http://www.start.umd.edu/start/research/projects/project.asp?id=43) is Steven Chermak (http://www.start.umd.edu/start/research/investigators/investigator.asp?id=47). This is how these people think: if you have...

Oracle, which is developing the website, has assured Rocky King the site will be operational by Dec. 1 The same problem that’s plagued the federal health insurance exchange – healthcare.gov – appears responsible for Cover Oregon’s failure to implement its web-based portal on Oct. 1: technology. Even though Cover Oregon has paid Oracle, the technology giant, $43.2 million this year, the site’s still not working, and temporary workers are processing paper applications. As of Tuesday, Cover Oregon had received 17,000 applications but can’t say how many people may require subsidies, or want to enroll in the Oregon Health Plan, Healthy...

Jeb Bush can deride and mock opponents of shoddy, costly, intrusive, and unconstitutional Common Core standards all he wants. The grass-roots movement against Fed Ed can’t be stopped. In Bush’s own Florida, GOP Gov. Rick Scott issued an executive order yesterday withdrawing the state from the Common Core testing consortium known as PARCC. Word is out that Gov. Rick Scott wants to pull Florida out of the PARCC testing consortium affiliated with the Common Core State Standards. Tampa Bay Times bureau chief Steve Bousquet is reporting on Twitter that Scott wants to sever ties with PARCC, for which Florida has...

A Baltimore-area police chief is reviewing the arrest of a man who rose at a town hall-style meeting to challenge the national Common Core standards and wound up in an angry confrontation with an off-duty police officer. Robert Small,46,showed up at the public forum Thursday night in Towson,but when he began asking questions about Common Core, the police officer,who was providing security at the meeting,shut him down. “My question is how does lowering educational standards prepare kids for ... college,because that’s what it’s all about?” Small asked in a scene caught on videotape. But audience members had been told to...

Think the NSA data collection on your phone calls and Internet use is scary? Well, here comes Obamacare. On October 1, the law’s insurance exchanges are scheduled to start open enrollment in all 50 states. In order to help people sign up for insurance and to determine which applicants are eligible for subsidies or Medicaid, the exchanges will need to collect both tax and health-care data for more than 7 million Americans. This means a new government bureaucracy will be in possession of these people’s financial, employment, and health information — everything from their income last year to the prescription...

LONDON — You can ditch your computer and leave your cellphone at home, but you can't escape your DNA. It belongs uniquely to you — and, increasingly, to the authorities. Countries around the world are collecting genetic material from millions of citizens in the name of fighting crime and terrorism — and, according to critics, heading into uncharted ethical terrain. Leaders include the United States — where the Supreme Court recently backed the collection of DNA swabs from suspects on arrest — and Britain, where police held samples of almost 7 million people, more than 10 percent of the population,...

WASHINGTON — The escalating spying affair dogging the Obama administration now includes a bipartisan request for accountability from more than a fourth of U.S. senators, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. **SNIP** They said it is regrettable the information was revealed by a government whistleblower instead of the Obama administration. In a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the senators say it is time for the White House to come clean. They want him to provide straight answers to fundamental questions about the gigantic, clandestine and problematic government data collections that include huge stockpiles of information on ordinary Americans’...

Ten years before the recent global panic over the U.S. government’s domestic spying program, the Pentagon solicited contractors for a searchable database of people’s lives. In 2003, the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hoped to create a database that would amass everything about the life of a person participating in the project, ranging from GPS coordinates to every email and phone call sent and received. The participant would wear a camera, microphone and sensors to record the minutia of everyday life. The program, called Lifelog, would act as a person’s digital diary.

Yet another glitch seems to be popping up in the immigration reform debate, and I’ll confess that I really didn’t see this one coming. One portion of the proposal regards expanding – and making mandatory in a variety of cases – the use of the E-Verify system. This would ensure that employers were making use of the system to screen out illegal immigrants when hiring. But if it applies to immigrants, in the opinion of some observers, it winds up applying to everyone. And that could lead to the equivalent of a national ID database. “Over time, this could become...

<p>If you voted this election season, President Obama almost certainly has a file on you. His vast campaign database includes information on voters’ magazine subscriptions, car registrations, housing values and hunting licenses, along with scores estimating how likely they were to cast ballots for his reelection.</p>