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Update: Data-mining goes deeper than thought? It’s not just the number of requests, it’s the scope of them. They’re not demanding records related to particular investigations anymore, they’re demanding huge troves of records on random Americans for data-mining purposes, the same thing Patriot Act co-author Jim Sensenbrenner complained about a few days ago but somehow didn’t foresee in 2001.

Apparently the big Internet companies are not as "innocent" in all of this as they originally led us to believe. So this additional information changes some of the conclusions that I reached in my original article. It appears that some of the biggest Internet companies have been cooperating with the government in this data collection effort at least to a certain extent. The following is from an article in the New York Times that describes how the U.S. government has been getting user data from major Internet companies... The companies that negotiated with the government include Google, which owns YouTube;...

How Much Has It Cost Us? I was pondering a possible block diagram or flow chart of the steps and the technology necessary to mine data on this grand scale. Without getting into details, I assert it is very expensive. How much did the electronic collection hardware cost? How much did the data storage hardware cost? How much did the network hardware cost? How much did the network software cost? How much did it cost to create a searchable database? How much did it cost to enter the collected data? How much did it cost to maintain the database? How...

It's no joke to the Obama administration, apparently. NBC's Pete Williams reported on Morning Joe earlier today that the Department of Justice will “definitely” open an investigation into the leak of the NSA’s data-mining efforts with Verizon — and who knows how many other telecoms — that ended up in the Guardian last night.CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Shocked? A “senior administration official” tells the Huffington Post that Williams’ report is, er … premature. Williams later dialed “definitely” back to “highly likely”: However, a senior administration official told The Huffington Post Thursday morning that it’s premature to suggest an...

Domestic Spying Revelation Could Be Devastating For The Obama White House Peter Foster, The Telegraph June. 6, 2013, 6:46 AM The Obama administration will be bracing itself for a torrent of hostile questions this morning following the apparent revelation that the National Security Agency has been data-mining the phone records of tens of millions of ordinary Americans. Not to be confused with eaves-dropping, or bugging the phones of those suspected of conspiring to commit a terrorist or criminal offence, the top secret court order published by The Guardian appears to show that the NSA has been trawling the anonymous 'metadata'...

Exxon employs thousands of engineers and geologists. Naturally, it is concerned about the quality of the U.S. educational system. Like many large corporations, Exxon believes the Obama-Jeb Bush -Bill Gates-backed Common Core scheme will improve education. Reality check: This top-down federalization of academic standards and testing will do just the opposite not only for math education, but across the pedagogical board. Today, Exxon aired pro-Common Core ads during the Masters golf tournament. Informed parents, activists, and educators gave the edu-propaganda a big, fat “F.”

Thanks to grass-roots activism, limited-government think tanks, whistle-blowing educators and bloggers, vigilant local and state legislators, and tireless parents committed to protecting their children, the truth about federalized Common Core standards is spreading.… Some stalwart conservatives inside the RNC get it. They’re bucking the mooooooderate Republican line on Common Core and have put forth a resolution being considered this afternoon at the RNC spring meeting. I heard from one of the co-sponsors of the resolution today, who believes it will pass. I’ll update with developments. Here’s the full text of the resolution, via Shane Vander Hart at Truth in American...

A recent notice from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reveals that the agency intends to acquire an online database capable of bringing up many of an individual’s personal characteristics and connections with just a few keystrokes. On March 28 the federal law enforcement organization, which is a branch of the US Department of Justice, filed a solicitation notice for a “massive online data repository system” for its Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information. The solicitation is hosted on the Federal Business Opportunities website, where vendors and developers can offer their services to the government in a competitive reverse...

JUST SAY NO!Yesterday, Glenn Beck and his team at The Blaze TV aired a terrific program with teachers and activists exposing some of the basic myths and failures of the Common Core racket (click on the link and be sure to sign up. Glenn’s network is doing invaluable, forward-thinking work). It was heartening to see the trailblazers receive the time and attention tthey deserve. And it’s just the tip of the educational iceberg.My column today delves further into the creepy Fed Ed data-mining racket. Don’t just sit there. Get involved. As always, see the links and resources at the end...

Building upon its fundraising prowess, Mitt Romney's campaign began a secretive data-mining project this summer to sift through Americans' personal information—including their purchasing history and church attendance—to identify new and likely wealthy donors, The Associated Press has learned. The project employs strategies similar to those the business world uses to influence the way Americans shop and think. Now they're being used to sway presidential elections. The same personal data consumers give away—often unwittingly when they swipe their credit cards or log into Facebook—is now being used by the people who might one day occupy the White House. … An AP...

What kind of data does it have? "If you are an American adult," says Singer, "the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on." It does more than collect that information, though. It uses it to pigeonhole people into one of 70 very specific socioeconomic clusters in an attempt to predict how they'll act, what they'll buy, and how companies can persuade them to buy their products. It gathers its data trove from public records, surveys you've filled...

On the sixth floor of a sleek office building here, more than 150 techies are quietly peeling back the layers of your life. They know what you read and where you shop, what kind of work you do and who you count as friends. They also know who your mother voted for in the last election. The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation — from data mining to online organizing — reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election. It makes the...

In doing some research on coupon websites, we discovered that Sallie Mae is using what appears to be a harmless coupon website called Upromise to collect information on our pre-college age youth and sell it for a profit

The U.S. government is seeking software that can mine social media to predict everything from future terrorist attacks to foreign uprisings, according to requests posted online by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Hundreds of intelligence analysts already sift overseas Twitter and Facebook posts to track events such as the Arab Spring. But in a formal "request for information" from potential contractors, the FBI recently outlined its desire for a digital tool to scan the entire universe of social media — more data than humans could ever crunch.

Eric Schmidt has an idea for Congress: Do what the President wants. Google's chairman urged lawmakers to pass the $447 billion stimulus plan during an interview with Christiane Amanpour. "The economy is, today, stuck behind the power curve -- it needs a lot of encouragement,” Schmidt, who was a big supporter of Obama during his campaign and was rumored to be a candidate for the Secretary of Commerce post, told the host.

If you are interested in social networks, don’t miss the slick video about Max Schrems’ David and Goliath struggle with Facebook over the way they are treating his personal information.  Click on the red “CC” in the lower right-hand corner to see the English subtitles.Max is a 24 year old law student from Vienna with a flair for the interview and plenty of smarts about both technology and legal issues.  In Europe there is a requirement that entities with data about individuals make it available to them if they request it.  That’s how Max ended up with a personalized CD from Facebook that he printed out on a...

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Vermont law that barred the sale of doctors' prescription data to drug companies, ruling the law interfered with the pharmaceutical industry's First Amendment right to market its products. Data companies such as IMS Health Inc. gather information from pharmacies on which medicines doctors are prescribing and how often. Drug makers buy the data, using it to refine their marketing pitches and measure which salespeople are the most effective. A 2007 Vermont law effectively banned the practice in the state. It said data-mining companies can't sell the prescription information for marketing...

TONIGHT at 9 pm ET...Each time you use a search engine, you disclose something about yourself. And it tends to be more than just passing interests; your searches reveal your wants, needs, desires, and fears. Over time, you may unwittingly divulge your age, sex, religion, ethnic group, profession, political views and medical concerns.That information can be exploited by its owners (ED: i.e. Google) to create dossiers on you that would make former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover look like a piker.Google is not the company it claims to be. Evolving from an information servant to master, the company's unprecedented centralization...

Details of an emerging data-mining and intelligence-analysis program reminiscent of the Pentagon’s controversial Total Information Awareness (TIA) project emerged yesterday, U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor has discovered. Similar to TIA, which Congress in 2003 de-funded insofar as domestic applications, the Insight Focused Incubator initiative seeks to create a multimedia system that obtains, synthesizes, and analyzes mass volumes of data via the development of an advanced “‘plug and play’ modular architecture” of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) technologies. According to a Special Notice that the Monitor obtained via routine database research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued a call...

Customers who use their credit cards at stores can no longer be asked for their ZIP code, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday.