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NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites. The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation #...

Judging by some of the responses I've received to the previous posts in this health care series, I think it's important to make it clear that the illustrative features I talked about in my last post are not suggested components of some government run health care scheme. I oppose the government takeover of the health sector. It should also be clear from the ideas I've outlined that I oppose perpetuating the third party payer system in any form, whether as a single payer government run approach, or in continuation of the existing private corporate structure. One of the keys to...

Elizabeth Ann Thrasher is being prosecuted under the Missouri felony harassment statute passed in the wake of the Lori Drew case. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports: Elizabeth A. Thrasher, 40, [was involved in] online [bickering] with the 17-year-old daughter of a woman Thrasher's ex-husband was dating.... The teen [then] sent a MySpace message to Thrasher, telling her to grow up. Thrasher ... then created a listing on Craigslist's Casual Encounters section, investigators said. The listing included the teen's picture, employer, e-mail address and cell phone number. Banas said the posting's language would lead people to believe it was an invitation...

I’m highly insulted that I have to discover the purported real age of the president of the United States of America on that official government source, his MySpace page. However by this correction alone Barack Hussein Obama has just set in motion events that will rock this Nation to its core. This is a blockbuster revelation. That’s right! With all of the Obama supports who have called everyday Americans the Liberal coined pejorative “birthers” because we have dared to ask to see some solid evidence about events surrounding Obama’s birth (as if these sycophants knew the truth) the shamelessness of...

If President Obama was born in Hawaii was it while the islands yet remained a territory of the United States? A new wrinkle in the dispute over his birth – and whether he is eligible to be president under the U.S. Constitution's requirement that the president be none other than a "natural born" citizen – appeared today when Obama's MySpace page confirmed his age is 52. That would mean if he was born on the islands that now make up the state of Hawaii it would have been during the archipelago's days as a territory for the United States, the...

An immediate ban on commercial social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace went into effect for all Marine Corps personnel using the unclassified Marine Corps Enterprise Network (MCEN) NIPRNET this past Monday. This ban does not affect the personal use of social media by Marines on their own private computers or wired devices. But perhaps it should. The ban went into effect — according to the memo — because the “very nature of social networking sites creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage.” The stated...

And other social networking sites as the Pentagon weighed a similar prohibition over cybersecurity concerns. The Marines had already banned the use of social media on military networks but issued a more detailed order this week defining which sites were out of bounds and noting possible exceptions to the rule, a Marine Corps spokesman, Lieutenant Craig Thomas said. "These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries," the Marine Corps said in an order posted on its website. "The...

The U.S. Marines have banned Twitter and Facebook. That the Marines have banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and various other social networking sites comes in an article from Wired magazine. The Marines banned Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace as part of a move to protect their systems and personnel, and further keep themselves protected from online influences. The ban isn't limited to just those sites, but many social media and social networking web-sites. The Marines' ban will last at least one year, and has been drawn up as a response to the ever growing concern that these sites can be a dangerous...

Websites such as Facebook and MySpace encourage teenagers to view friendship as a "commodity" and are leading them to suicide, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has warned. Archbishop Vincent Nichols said the sites are leading teenagers to build "transient relationships" which leave them unable to cope when their social networks collapse. He said the internet and mobile phones were "dehumanising" community life. His comments follow the death of 15-year-old schoolgirl who took a fatal overdose of painkillers last week after being bullied on Bebo, another networking site. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the...

Speaking at this week’s Personal Democracy Forum in New York, boyd said that even among people with access to the Net, long-held social divisions of race, class, and income are starting to play out online, particularly among teens now starting to choose which social network they prefer, MySpace or Facebook. “Social media don’t eradicate social divisions,” says boyd, an expert in NextGen behaviors for Microsoft and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “[Social media are] making the old social divisions obvious in totally new ways.”

A couple of days ago I discovered that when I clicked on MY PROFILE , somebody else's profile which hasn't been accessed in 4 year appears . There is no problem with my HOME page , and all my info / pic links / etc are still in EDIT PROFILE . I contacted MYSPACE but have not heard back from them as yet . Anybody got an idea as to what happened or what I can do about it ?

A Los Angeles federal judge has tentatively thrown out the convictions of a Missouri mother for her role in a MySpace hoax directed at a 13-year-old neighbor girl who ended up committing suicide. In his ruling Thursday, U.S. District Judge George Wu has acquitted Lori Drew of misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization. Wu says his ruling will become final when he issues it in writing. Drew was convicted in a trial, but the judge says that if she is to be found guilty of illegally accessing computers, anyone who has ever violated the social networking site's terms of...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – MySpace, the social network owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, said it will cut 30 percent of its staff to lower costs as it struggles to stay popular in the face of rising competition. MySpace will be left with about 1,000 employees, it said in a statement released on Tuesday. The company declined to say how many people work at the service, but the percentage suggests that about 400 people will lose their jobs. The cuts, which were presaged in several blog reports in recent weeks, are the biggest move so far by new management at...

As employers make Google searches a routine part of the hiring process, college newspapers are seeing an increase in the number of alumni looking to have their names removed from articles they wrote or were quoted in during their college years. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a growing number of papers are being drawn into controversy about whether to grant alumni requests to rewrite a paper's historical record because certain articles or comments could make finding a job difficult or because they could create difficulties and conflicts of interest in the future. The trend is just one of...

A man who rode his bicycle 180 miles to have sex with a Scranton teen he met on the Internet will serve one to four years in prison, a judge ruled Wednesday. William Wagner, 26, 414 Battery Drive, Havre de Grace, Md., met the 15-year-old girl through the social networking Web site MySpace. In June, he biked to Scranton to meet the teen. In February, Mr. Wagner pleaded guilty to unlawful contact with a minor. He slept at Pine Brook baseball field, Sanderson Avenue and Green Place, while he was in Scranton. He took the teen to the baseball field...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Militants and hate groups increasingly use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube as propaganda tools to recruit new members, according to a report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The report released on Wednesday noted a 25 percent rise in the past year in the number of "problematic" social networking groups on the Internet. The report was based on "over 10,000 problematic Web sites, social networking groups, portals, blogs, chat rooms, videos and hate games on the Internet which promote racial violence, anti-semitism, homophobia, hate music and terrorism." "Every aspect of the Internet is...

London, England (CNS) - Britain's Prince Charles is opening a MySpace account. The 60-year-old royal has turned to the social networking site to warn young people about the dangers of deforestation and climate change.His page is expected to explain why it is vital to preserve rain forests and how cutting down trees emits more carbon in a year than all the cars, planes, boats and trucks in the world.Speaking about his decision to take his eco-crusade online, Charles said: "One of the internet's strengths is that it can enable diverse communities to come together to ensure that everybody's views and...

The most tech savvy administration ever. The White House is now using communication methods that are popular amongst 7th grade girls and sexual predators. We wrote earlier this week about the White House's new Flickr photo account, now consider that the White House now has account on My Space, Twitter, and Facebook. How well is this "communication tool" working? Here's some comments I found from people at the White House's My Space page: "thanx for the add! if you dont mind my sayin so chief i think we ought to legalize marijuana, it would deflate the drug cartels, including the...

Hulu is getting new content and cash from Disney, giving it an impressive line-up of broadcast TV content for its online video site. This announcement comes barely a week after Google’s YouTube video site announced partnership deals with a slew of movie and television studios, including Lion’s Gate and Starz. The deal is a significant boost to Hulu as it seeks to leapfrog Fox Interactive, which owns MySpace, for the second spot in viewership behind YouTube, and could eventually help it overtake the overall market leader. But it still has quite a way to go before that happens.Chris Dale, a...

SNIPPET: "Seems the FBI was concerned about threats - which included a pledge to turn a tax protest into a blood bath - allegedly made by a Twitter user identified as CitizenQuasar. The FBI arrested Daniel Knight Hayden, 52. Hayden’s penultimate tweet at 12:49 AM on April 15 returned to the subject of his martyrdom. “Locked AND loaded for the Oklahoma State Capitol. Let’s see what happens.” The FBI arrested (.pdf) him at his home later that day, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oklahoma City, which otherwise declined to comment on the case."