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| Guttmacher.Org |
... the ultrasound requirement is designed to help the woman bond with the fetus and convince her to save it. The admitting privileges mandate is meant to ensure an abortion provider can follow up with a patient at the hospital if an emergency arises, they say.So that's the job of the government now, to help women bond with their fetus? They lie of course, they are trying to whittle away the right of a woman to determine her own reproductive choice, bit by bit, by any means necessary. Women are just too stupid to figure these things out for themselves, so they need sonograms and pictures and men to tell them how awful they are.
Weev's conviction is a prime example of how the CFAA threatens security researchers with prison sentences for discovering security vulnerabilities.All of the information he had was readily available on public websites. Read the whole chilling tale here and here.
In 2010, Weev's co-defendant Daniel Spitler discovered AT&T configured its website to automatically publish an iPad user's e-mail address when the server was queried with a URL containing the number that matched an iPad's SIM card ID. In other words, if anyone typed in the correct URL with a correct ID number, the e-mail address associated with that account would automatically appear in the login prompt. Spitler wrote a script that attempted to emulate the IDs by entering random numbers into the URL and, as a result, ultimately collected approximately 114,000 e-mail addresses. Auernheimer sent a list of the e-mail addresses to several journalists to prove the security problem, and Gawker published a story about the vulnerability.
Although Auernheimer's actions helped motivate AT&T to fix the hole, he was rewarded with a federal indictment instead of a bounty. Federal prosecutors in New Jersey claimed that Weev and Spitler accessed data—the e-mail addresses—without authorization under the CFAA despite the fact AT&T made the information publicly available over the Internet.
Critics say the bureau bends to the interests of ranchers, who for generations have grazed their livestock on public lands leased for below-market cost.The actions of departed Obama Interior Department head Ken Salazar would be comical if they weren't so sad in regards to our nation's wild horse population. You can read a bit about it here. Over 35.000 horses rounded up and presumably sent to the mexican slaughterhouse during his tenure.
"The agency removes horses, but you don't see them taking cattle off the range," said Bob Edwards, a former BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program official.
Hell, some of the finest meat you will ever eat is a fat yearling colt. What is wrong with taking all those BLM horses they got all fat and shiny and setting up a kill plant?" Tom Davis
Some BLM corral managers said in interviews they felt uneasy shipping so many horses to a single buyer, and one they knew so little about, but said such decisions weren’t up to them.Ranchers in this country are quick to point their fingers at wolves, at wild horses, at commies lurking in the weeds. What is more communistic than letting American cattlemen graze their herds on public lands for pennies on the dollar at the expense of American's wild horse herds?
"That all happens in Washington," one said, echoing the comments of many. "We are just peons. We do what we are told."
Davis said BLM employees occasionally asked where his horses ended up, but said he tells them it’s “none of your damn business.”
"They never question me too hard. It makes 'em look good if they're movin' these horses, see?" he said. "Every horse I take from them saves them a lot of money. I’m doing them a favor. I’m doing the American people a favor."
“[Immersion] asks users for their Gmail address and password; it then scans every e-mail in their accounts and scrapes the metadata to create a portrait of their personal network. With the circles and lines of a network diagram, it highlights the 100 people with whom you’ve communicated most, and shows how closely they’re connected to you and how thickly interconnected with one another in your mailbox.”
"Our commitment to Egypt has never been around any particular individual or party. Our commitment has been to a process," he said. "What is clear right now is that although Mr Morsi was elected democratically, there's more work to be done to create the conditions in which everybody feels that their voices are heard, and that the government is responsive and truly representative."More work to be done, huh? What is that, diplomacy speak? Morsi was not going to be re mediated, pal. I know the type. And read into it whatever you like, the opposition sees Obama as aiding the regime. From CSM:
On June 18, US Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson delivered a speech in Cairo to, she said, "set the record straight" on America's relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly the popular conspiracy theory that the US had somehow engineered Morsi's rise to power. But her insistence that the elected president must be respected, dismissal of street protests as useful or appropriate, and failure to offer any criticism of either Morsi or the Brotherhood enraged Morsi's opponents. "This is the government that you and your fellow citizens elected. Even if you voted for others, I don’t think the elected nature of this government is seriously in doubt," she said. The speech also convinced critics that the US was indeed favoring the Brothers. "Some say that street action will produce better results than elections. To be honest, my government and I are deeply skeptical," she said.
Ms. Patterson also put the US firmly in the camp of "stability" over change in her speech, mirroring US policies in Egypt and across the region for decades. "Egypt needs stability to get its economic house in order, and more violence on the streets will do little more than add new names to the lists of martyrs. Instead, I recommend Egyptians get organized. Join or start a political party that reflects your values and aspirations. Egyptians need to know a better path forward. This will take time. You will have to roll up your sleeves and work hard. Progress will be slow and you often will feel frustrated. But there is no other way." She failed to mention the guilty verdicts for democracy NGO workers just a few weeks before.
On June 4, Egypt sentenced 43 Egyptians and foreigners, some of them Americans, to jail for the crime of working with democracy promotion NGOs (among them the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which receive most of their funding from the US government).
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“It’s a treasure trove of information,” said James J. Wedick, a former F.B.I. agent who spent 34 years at the agency and who said he used mail covers in a number of investigations, including one that led to the prosecution of several elected officials in California on corruption charges. “Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena.” But, he said: “It can be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.” For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies simply submit a letter to the Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request without judicial review. Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service rarely denies a request.
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| photo: Orange County Register |
On May 16, Hazard told Olson the City would drop the case if he agreed to serve 32-hours of community service, attend an 8-hour seminar by the "Corrective Behavior Institute," pay Bank of America $6,299 in restitution for the clean-up, waive all Fourth Amendment rights guarding against search and seizures, and surrender his driver's license for three year period."Waive his Fourth Amendment rights, are you kidding me!
Olson refused.
"The jury sent a real strong message that the First Amendment is alive and well in San Diego," Olson said. "You have the freedom of speech, you should use it."What a ridiculous waste of taxpayer monies by San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith. Who purportedly received campaign contributions from Bank of America and whose staff played a game of rather intimate footsie with Bank of America. The mayor, Bob Filner, has rightfully ridiculed the prosecution as excessive.
“It looks like we were prosecuting someone at the insistence of Bank of America for writing political issues. I mean, it’s chalk. It’s washable chalk. It’s political slogans. We are not even responding to public complaints. They were complaints from Bank of America. I think it’s a stupid case and is costing us money. If these are the types of cases the City Attorney is prosecuting then I am not sure he needs as much money in his budget as he says he does.”
San Diego Mayor Bob Filner
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| Broyles |
Recent news about the expansive reach of the NSA is enough to make anyone a little paranoid. For those with paranoia in the clinical sense, however, the overwhelming suspicion that “someone is watching” is old news.There are many different flavors of delusion,” says Dr. David Kimhy, Director of the Experimental Psychopathology Lab in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. He explains that, though revelations about the NSA could increase general anxiety in the individual with schizophrenia, the scandal should only significantly affect those whose delusions mirror the news.So if all the shit turns out to be real, do we owe the wackos an apology? Like, there are little voices in my head. "Of course there are, they come from that little implantable worm we placed in your stomach after that thorazine injection. If we hadn't induced a little psychotic episode, how the hell would we take possession and turn you into a perfect little manchurian candidate?"
“If you think the American government is spying on you, that’s one thing,” says Kimhy. “If you think it’s Russian intelligence, that wouldn’t have the same impact.” Still, he clarifies that in cases of individuals whose delusional narratives involve something resembling the NSA’s PRISM program, certainly, real-life manifestations of imagined threats could interact with symptoms of psychosis.
“Another piece of information added to other information, real or imagined, naturally would add some stress,” says Kimhy. However, he speculates that current events could alternatively offer a therapeutic benefit in such cases.
“The thought that the government is following everyone, in a paradoxical way, may take away from the delusion,” says Kimhy. Individuals with persecutory delusions usually feel that they are unique targets; thus, the broad net of surveillance that is so troubling to the NSA’s critics might reduce feeling of persecution in an individual who previously believed the government was only after him. Indeed, the therapist might use this broadness as a context in which to discuss the patient’s delusions. “You could ask, ‘What’s so unique to you? What special powers do you have? And by the way, why don’t we talk about those special powers,’” says Kimhy.
In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.
I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.
Edward Joseph Snowden*
Monday 1st July 2013
Mr. Thiessen said the president and his team have looked “weak and vacillating and defensive” while overreacting by giving out too much information.“It’s not just that they’re not effectively defending themselves,” he said. “It’s that they’re doing more damage by the way they’re defending themselves. They’re pandering to the civil libertarian left, and they’re afraid of the libertarian right. So their damage control has done almost as much damage as the leak itself... The president has his own base up in arms while we had our base more reflexively behind us. And the opposition is more vocal now.”Pandering to libertarians is it? I suppose the notion is that if the fourth amendment and its buddies can't keep up with the latest technology, there just won't be any fourth amendment. Heavens that people would be bothered, in this day and age...
But you don't have to leave Tennessee to find evidence of the pernicious reflex to cast concerned or dissenting citizens as criminally dangerous. As part of a lawsuit between Camden, Tenn. residents and TDEC over an industrial landfill in their neighborhood — a case that was recently decided in the residents' favor — Mark Totty filed an affidavit detailing his experience living fewer than 800 yards from the landfill.*
In his affidavit, Totty says that after spending months trying to contact elected officials at the city, county, state and federal levels, he sought a meeting with Gov. Bill Haslam during the summer of 2011 on behalf of a group of his neighbors. "We wanted an opportunity to voice our concerns about this landfill and how it got into our neighborhood without local approval," Totty states in the legal document.
After "numerous phone calls," Totty says he was asked to put his request for a meeting in writing. He says he did so "multiple times" prior to a public hearing in July 2011, but "did not get a response to any of these requests."
Or so he thought.
"In September of 2011," he says, "I learned that the Capital Police Department contacted my local police department asking if I was a threat to the governor. This is very disturbing to me and my family."
If such disturbances could ever be dismissed as paranoia, it's a luxury of the past, or at least the days before we knew our government was spying on us in almost every way and playing judge and jury behind closed doors. And if any agency would benefit from marginalizing or intimidating its critics, it's TDEC, facing a litany of complaints, legal challenges and defeats, and accusations of slipshod, indifferent environmental regulation.
There might not be anything in the water, and the government might use its power nobly. But given today's climate of justified distrust, they can't expect anyone to take their word for it.
[Judge] Kollar-Kotelly disputed the NSA report’s suggestion of a fairly high level of coordination between the court and the NSA and Justice in 2004 to re-create certain authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that created the court in response to abuses of domestic surveillance in the 1960s and 1970s.Interesting article. General Hayden is running interference for the judges, "they weren't a rubber stamp. she spanked us when we were naughty..."
“That is incorrect,” she said. “I participated in a process of adjudication, not ‘coordination’ with the executive branch. The discussions I had with executive branch officials were in most respects typical of how I and other district court judges entertain applications for criminal wiretaps under Title III, where issues are discussed ex parte.”
The perception that the court works too closely with the government arises in large part from the tribunal’s “ex parte” nature, which means that unlike in a traditional court, there is no legal sparring between adversaries with the judge as arbiter. Instead, a Justice Department official makes the case for the government agency seeking permission to carry out surveillance inside the United States. No one speaks for the target of the surveillance or the company that is ordered to allow its networks to be tapped or to turn over its customers’ data.
Under contract to the Department of Defense (DoD), Logos Technologies has deployed 11 of its Kestrel intelligent persistent surveillance systems to forward operating bases in Afghanistan. DoD uses Kestrel mounted on aerostats, where the devices can scan wide areas for suspicious activity. Kestrel, which can watch an area the size of a city, also can help its operators retrace the steps of criminals or insurgents to uncover their activities or to figure out their patterns, John Marion, Logos Technologies executive vice president, told Homeland Security Today.
"It takes a picture every second and stores it. It's good in real-time for situational awareness and for monitoring -- for instance -- the border fence in Nogales," Marion said. "But it's also a time machine in the sense that you can go back in time and recreate what occurred."
During the test in Arizona, the CBP operators used the system in one case to monitor trespassers with backpacks, a certain sign that they were smuggling drugs. The subjects under surveillance managed to hide their backpacks at one point; they may have been lost to authorities if a solution like Kestrel had not been able to rewind surveillance video and see where the backpacks disappeared and thus locate where they were stashed.
In a similar way, Border Patrol agents could use Kestrel to discover the patterns in movements of illegal migrants or drug smugglers as they cross into the United States, Marion suggested. In Afghanistan, soldiers have been able to understand the patterns of insurgent networks by observing their behavior with Kestrel and tracking the various key points in their routes. Using this information, warfighters have been able to determine where drop points or communications hubs for high-level insurgents have been as Kestrel was able to track the movements of low-level insurgents over time.
Kestrel, like the Vader radar system, is a paradigm-shifting technology, Marion said. They allow security forces to perform innovative tasks in new ways.Border Patrol agents were able to track the number of getaways, illegal migrants who escaped, using Kestrel because of its ability to track everything in its range. As lawmakers call upon the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to improve its metrics for detaining illegal aliens, Kestrel can help, Marion said.
"They were impressed that virtually everybody we could see, we caught," he said.
