Category Archives: Police State

No Fly, No Gun? NO WAY!

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On youtube recently, a video of  Congressman Rahm Emmanuel (D-IL) speaking on May 15, 2007 at DC’s annual Stand Up For a Safe America, sponsored by the Brady Center for Gun Control letting citizens know that, should they wander onto the government’s no-fly lists, they’ll be unable to purchase a hand gun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vp7f1QKYmg.

Note: In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center ( an FBI run group that consolidates terrorist watch list information) had over 700,000 names  (on April 2007), with the number growing by over 20,000 records on average per month.

Note:  this US Dept. of Justice report indicates over a million names.

http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/plus…

And commentary from the ACLU:

http://www.aclu.org/privacy/spying/wa…

 Comment:

You do  know that you could get on those no fly lists for some very minor reason. Especially now that practically everything you said on the phone or on the ‘net has entered the government’s data base with every prospect of staying there forever.

This means, in effect, that any citizen could be disarmed forcibly without having done anything to warrant it – on some mere technicality, on a  suspicion of wrong doing, or worse yet, for no reason but bureaucratic imbecility — as in this infamous case noted by BoingBoing:

“A five-year-old boy was taken into custody and thoroughly searched at Sea-Tac because his name is similar to a possible terrorist alias. As the Consumerist reports, “When his mother went to pick him up and hug him and comfort him during the proceedings, she was told not to touch him because he was a national security risk. They also had to frisk her again to make sure the little Dillinger hadn’t passed anything dangerous weapons or materials to his mother when she hugged him.”

Rahmbo  – you should have stuck to plie-ing and pirouetting.

But if you haven’t forgotten how to do it, I suggest you take a grand jete into the nearest body of H2O.

Libertarian Living: The Best US Internet Law….

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“#1: 47 USC 230

This law was enacted in 1996 (as part of the Communications Decency Act, discussed below) during the heyday of the cyberspace exceptionalism movement—about the same time as Barlow’s Declaration of Independence and Johnson/Post’s Internet self-governance article. Indeed, this law is one of the most conspicuous examples of how a legislative body has set different rules for physical space and cyberspace. In this case, the law provides websites and other intermediaries a near-absolute immunization from liability for their users’ content—even if offline publishers would be liable for publishing the exact same user content in dead trees.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this law to the Internet’s evolution. Without this law, all Internet content probably would be subject to a notice-and-takedown regime like we have for copyright law (see discussion about the DMCA Online Safe Harbors below). If websites had to remove user content upon notice to avoid liability, they would act conservatively, quickly pulling down complained-about content without much fuss. So, any company unhappy with negative consumer comments could simply contact the web host, claim that the comments were defamatory (making the web host potentially liable for the content), and expect the web host to scramble to take down the user’s comment.

But in this takedown melee, only negative remarks would be targeted (there would be no legal grounds—or reason—to target positive comments). Thus, notice-and-takedown rules would result in “lopsided” databases in which only positive opinions/commentary would remain, but many negative comments could be quickly excised. This would ruin the capability of the consumer opinion sites (for example, eBay’s feedback forum and Amazon product reviews) to hold people and companies accountable for their choices. Indeed, by undermining the credibility of Internet content generally, a notice-and-takedown scheme could diminish the Internet’s vitality as a mainstream information resource.

47 USC 230 eliminates the notice-and-takedown option for people and companies trying to escape accountability. As a result, 47 USC 230 is a big part of the reason why the Internet became such a massive success.”

From, “The Best and Worst Internet Laws,” Eric Goldman, Informit.com

Activism: Canadian Internet Journalist Fights Back

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“This past June, then Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced a bill on Parliament Hill that sparked debate across creative industries nationwide. Bill C-61, a reform on copyright legislation, could have potentially strangled the freedom of online journalists without them even realizing it. Fortunately, thanks to university professor, blogger and columnist Michael Geist, thousands were aware of the impending bill. When Geist heard of the proposal in December, 2007, he took to his blog, posted videos on YouTube and set up a Facebook group called Fair Copyright For Canada. Soon, Geist was everywhere, making appearances on CBC’s The Hour and TVO’s The Agenda. The bill didn’t survive with the October election, but the debate made many realize Canada needs to update its decade-old copyright legislation. And now Geist is leading the pack of journalists seeking fair copyright laws.

As writers increasingly find their print articles published online, Geist wants to clear the confusion around internet law and what it means for journalism. Legislation like C-61 would prevent journalists from effectively conducting research and news gathering, and would squelch our freedom of expression. While the government struggles to keep up with ever-evolving internet law, Geist continues to fight to protect the rights of journalists to conduct news gathering and keep the public informed. He is armed with two master’s degrees and a doctorate in law, and is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. His technology columns appear weekly in the Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen. As both a journalist and lawyer, Geist sees an urgent need to protect Canadians’ rights to use the internet for freedom of expression. “It’s often citizens who are performing journalistic activities who are the first and sometimes the most authentic source of information,” says Geist. “People who are engaged in [journalism] ought to enjoy the protection that journalists traditionally enjoy.” Geist sensed that online freedom was about to be seriously threatened a couple of years ago.

In fall 2007, rumours swirled around Ottawa that Prentice wanted to introduce legislation for anti-circumvention laws. Anti-circumvention prevents the circumvention of Digital Rights Management software placed on digital files (such as music or Word documents) by copyright holders. Under the copyright act, journalists are exempt from infringement under the Fair Dealing provision for the purpose of news reporting. But with the proposed legislation “everybody becomes a criminal, or at least an infringer,” says Geist, “once they seek to pick that lock…..”

More by Lori Grady at Ryerson’s Review of Journalism

Police State Chronicles: The All-Seeing Eyes Of Advertising

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Watch an advertisement on a video screen in a mall, health club or grocery store and there’s a slim — but growing — chance the ad is watching you too.

“Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity — and can change the ads accordingly.

That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens.

And even if the ads don’t shift based on which people are watching, the technology’s ability to determine the viewers’ demographics is golden for advertisers who want to know how effectively they’re reaching their target audience.

While the technology remains in limited use for now, advertising industry analysts say it is finally beginning to live up to its promise. The manufacturers say their systems can accurately determine gender 85 to 90 percent of the time, while accuracy for the other measures continues to be refined.”

From AP, via Cryptogon.

Wired And Watched In America

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“When asked the scope of the information collected on Americans by the NSA, he said “the parameters that were set for how to filter it … were things like … if a terrorist would normally only make a phone call for 1 or 2 minutes, then you look for communications that are only 1 or 2 minutes long. Now that could also be someone ordering a pizza, and asking their significant other what sort of toppings they wanted on their pizza.”

When asked how the NSA would handle questions asked by congressional committees, Tice claimed: “the NSA would tailor some of their briefings to try to be deceptive, for whether it be a congressional committee or someone they really didn’t want to know exactly what was going on. There would be a lot of bells and whistles in a briefing and quite often the meat of the briefing was deceptive.”

When asked in a second interview by MSNBC if the information collected stopped at phone and email info, Tice responded: “as far as the wiretap information that made it to NSA, there was also data mining involved. At some point information from credit card records and financial records was married in with that information.”

As a result of the NSA program, uncounted thousands of Americans may have had their privacy compromised and are thus victims of an illegal spying regime. Says Tice: “the lucky U.S. citizens, tens of thousands of whom, that are now on digital databases at NSA that have no idea of this, also have that information included on those digital files that have been warehoused.”

More at Wired.

 Comment:

The US Government spied on everyone

The Mind-Control Weapon In Your Living Room

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One of Britain’s leading authority’s on children’s speech development, she completed a ten year study which showed that the background noise in the average two year olds day can delay his or her acquisition of a language by up to a year. Almost invariably the background noise came from television.
Amongst other things she found that:
· Children learn to speak from their parents and parents don’t play or talk enough with their children when the TV is on.

· Background noise from TV or radio, confuses infants. In response they learn to ignore all noise and then they ignore speech.

· Children of two years or older should not be exposed to more than two hours of TV a day.

· Children of one year old or younger should not be exposed to television at all.
Sally Ward is currently preparing to focus on television and the way it affects our attention. In particular she will be looking at Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). “. . . a lot of people think it’s chemical,” she says, but in her view . . . “it’s very peculiar that at the onset of children’s television it got a lot more prevalent, and at the onset of children’s video’s it got a lot more prevalent.”
Her concern is being reiterated in America where child psychologist John Rosemond has stirred some controversy by suggesting that ADHD is environmentally created; a suggestion that is completely at odds with the pharmaceutical industry, which maintains that the disorder is genetically inherited and makes considerable profit as a result.
“Ritalin may work, temporarily,” says Rosemond, “But pharmaceutical intervention won’t change behavioural and motivational problems.” And these he blames on television – “the endlessly changing images, flickering like the attention spans of ADHD children.”

“Television: The Hidden Picture” – Rixon Stewart, via Handmaiden’s Kitchen

Vandals At The Gate – Updated

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“We won’t cede an inch to squeegee men, turnstile jumpers, and graffiti vandals who breed a sense of disorder and lawlessness,” the mayor said.

That’s Mayor Rudi -er – Mike Bloomberg, according to this piece in the NY Daily News, announcing his plans to step up law enforcement against “quality of life criminals” in the city.  He’s going to go after the “dirty dozen” in this bunch, he says.

Brave lad.  That’s what I’m lying awake agonizing over.  Some one jumping a turnstile.

 A couple of hustlers with buckets and squeegees. That’s what’s rmenacing the republic and breeding unrest in the population.

(Meanwhile, says Alan Nairn, in an interview with Amy Goodman  on the appointment of the genocide-supporting Admiral Blair  (I posted it recently), “Mayor Bloomberg of New York just went to Israel and gave a press conference where he said that the international law of proportional response was stupid. He rejected it.”

It’s not lawless for a state to retaliate out of all proportion when the state is legally and morally in the wrong, but hustling for pennies on the street is a monstrous crime.

Please.

I don’t know about you, but this is what cast a pall over me when I rolled out of bed this morning:

1. What was the point of the last 4 years of my life writing and petitioning against the Iraq war, torture, and financial criminality?

2.  How come I have to prove myself on a job but no one in Washington or New York does?

3.  Is this country revving up for more war and if so, when, where, and for how long?

4. Why work and save? Just get a bail-out. 

5. Why the heck can’t I get Tor to work on my computer and anyway, aren’t they turning over stuff to the government?

6.  Why doesn’t this site (www.mindbodypolitic.com) show up on google searches but my wordpress blog does? [this site shows up on altavista and yahoo)

7. How do you make yourself invisible without getting the powers- that-be interested in you.

8.  What’s the use if the credit bubble crashed but the bubble in disinformation’s still going strong…

 9.  How soon before the government clamps down on the net and  confiscates gold… and should I even bother buying physical?

10. Where do you escape to? There’s no place to run from the kleptocracy….

You’ll notice that squeegee men didn’t figure once. Not even in a supporting role. 

S. Korean Blogger Arrested For Spreading Economic False Information

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“SEOUL, South Korea – A South Korean blogger pleaded not guilty Saturday to charges that he spread false economic information on the Internet, a news report said, in a case that drew heated debate over freedom of speech.

The blogger, identified only by his surname Park, gained prominence among South Koreans because some of his dire predictions about the global economy, including the collapse of Lehman Brothers, later proved to be correct.

Known widely by his pen name “Minerva,” the mythological Greek goddess of wisdom, the 31-year-old Park was accused of spreading false information on an Internet discussion site last month that the government had ordered major financial institutions and trade businesses not to purchase U.S. dollars.

Kim Yong-sang, a judge at the Seoul Central District Court who issued an arrest warrant for Park following Saturday’s court hearing, said the case “affected foreign exchange markets and the nation’s credibility,” Yonhap news agency reported.

Park told the judge he wrote articles to help underprivileged people and did not seek any personal financial gain or harm the public interest, Yonhap said….”

More at AP.

Securing The Borders Or Snooping On Joe Citizen?

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 ” I had been curious about what’s in my travel dossier, so I made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a copy.
“My biggest surprise was that the Internet Protocol (I.P.) address of the computer used to buy my tickets via a Web agency was noted. On the first document image posted here, I’ve circled in red the I.P. address of the computer used to buy my pair of airline tickets.
(An I.P. address is assigned to every computer on the Internet. Each time that computer sends an e-mail—or is used to make a purchase via a Web browser — it has to reveal its I.P. address, which tells its geographic location.)
The rest of my file contained details about my ticketed itineraries, the amount I paid for tickets, and the airports I passed through overseas. My credit card number was not listed, nor were any hotels I’ve visited. In two cases, the basic identifying information about my traveling companion (whose ticket was part of the same purchase as mine) was included in the file. Perhaps that information was included by mistake.
Some sections of my documents were blacked out by an official. Presumably, this information contains material that is classified because it would reveal the inner workings of law enforcement….”

More at Yahoo travel.

Website Rankings on Google

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I’d hate to think the Powers That Be have so little to occupy their minds that they might actually waste time censoring my site.

So, let me put down to the Whims of the Web, such things as broken links, comments that vanish….and the mysterious problem I’ve had with my old free wordpress site, lilarajiva.wordpress.com, showing up at the top of google searches of my name, but not this one.

Some algorithm or other?

But today. I really am beginning to wonder. I did a search with Altavista and Yahoo and sure enough, this site appears at the very top as lilarajiva.com.

Hmmm. What is going on? And what to do about it? The old site is one I can’t access and free wordpress blogs can’t be redirected.