Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times: ars technica

“A blogger has released audio of Sprint's Electronic Surveillance Manager describing the carrier's cooperation with law enforcement. Among the revelations are that Sprint has so far filled over 8 million requests from LEOs for customer GPS data.

“By Jon Stokes | Last updated December 1, 2009 5:38 PM

“Christopher Soghoian, a graduate student at Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing, has made public an audio recording of Sprint/Nextel's Electronic Surveillance Manager describing how his company has provided GPS location data about its wireless customers to law enforcement over 8 million times.

“Through a mix of documents unearthed by Freedom of Information Act requests and the aforementioned recording, Soghoian describes how ‘the government routinely obtains customer records from ISPs detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time.’”

Sprint: 50 million customers, 8 million law enforcement GPS requests in 1 year from Christopher Soghoian on Vimeo.

Pastor Martin Niemoller: First they came for the Communists...

Why is Free Speech so important?...

Why speak up about things that don't seem to affect you?
Perhaps Pastor Martin Neimoller's view in one version of his quote will answer that question.
He supported the Nazis until he realized, too late, what they were really about and was sent to Dachau concentration camp.
He was one of the fortunate to be freed and live until 1984.


First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Social Democrats,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Social Democrat.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Jew,
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.

When DuPont Almost Overthrew the Government | Business Pundit

In the summer of 1933, shortly after Roosevelt’s “First 100 Days,” America’s richest businessmen were in a panic. It was clear that Roosevelt intended to conduct a massive redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Roosevelt had to be stopped at all costs. The answer was a military coup. It was to be secretly financed and organized by leading officers of the Morgan and Du Pont empires...

...The plot fell apart when Butler went public. The general revealed the details of the coup before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, which would later become the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. (In the 50s, this committee would destroy the lives of hundreds of innocent Americans with its communist witch hunts.) The Committee heard the testimony of Butler and French, but failed to call in any of the coup plotters for questioning, other than MacGuire. In fact, the Committee whitewashed the public version of its final report, deleting the names of powerful businessmen whose reputations they sought to protect. The most likely reason for this response is that Wall Street had undue influence in Congress also. Even more alarming, the elite-controlled media failed to pick up on the story, and even today the incident remains little known. The elite managed to spin the story as nothing more than the rumors and hearsay of Butler and French, even though Butler was a Quaker of unimpeachable honesty and integrity. Butler, appalled by the cover-up, went on national radio to denounce it, but with little success.

Butler was not vindicated until 1967, when journalist John Spivak uncovered the Committee's internal, secret report. It clearly confirmed Butler's story.

Terrorist Watchlist Has More Than One Million Names

By William Fisher

Hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified because of the government’s wasteful and inefficient management of the nation’s one million-strong terrorist watchlist, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The organization cited a recent report by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which found that the part of the watchlist maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may contain a 35 percent error rate.

The OIG audit also revealed that large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records.

The ACLU says the audit “confirms that the nation’s watchlist system is massively broken.”

The audit confirmed estimates that the terror watchlist contains 1.1 million names as of December 2008, and that many of them are out of date.

OIG auditors reviewed 68,669 of those identities and found 24,000 out of date. In a closer inspection of the out of date records, the auditors found a majority of this sample did not belong on a watchlist.

16 Year Old Homeschooler Hauled Away Under PATRIOT Act

A 16 year old American was hauled away after 10 FBI agents stormed his mother's house with a warrant accusing the boy of making bomb threats. The boy was deprived due process of law, as the PATRIOT act apparently now supersedes the Constitution.What country is this again?

read more | digg story

Typing "Prompt Commands" Sufficient to Seize Your Property

You need to take the time to read the warrant available via PDF. Insanity. Someone's computer crashes and suspects it's a CS student's fault because he does things like "'jail breaks' cell phones" and he is sometimes seen with a "[computer with] a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on." Yikes.

read more | digg story

#DiggCons: The HQ for conservatives spamming Digg

From the site: "How do I give? It's simple. When you see a link in the #diggcon Tweet stream, click on it and Digg it, Stumble it, R-igg, it, etc." Provides a realtime stream of right-wing Digg stories, all meant to be upvoted by a cadre of members in a coordinated fashion.

read more | digg story

The "dirty bomb" that disappeared

The curious tale of an Obama hating, cashed up, nuclear Timothy McVeigh from Maine.

read more | digg story

Georgia congressman warns of Obama dictatorship

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

read more | digg story

Village Idiot

Amy Goodman Arrested at RNC

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar were arrested by the Minneapolis Police Department. Charged with conspiracy to riot. Footage from Rick Rowley and Brandon Jourdan.

read more | digg story

Russia warned: withdraw from Georgia, or else | World news | The Guardian

FOX News Calls Neo-Nazi Leader a "Free Speech Activist"

On Aug. 4, FOX News aired a segment about the Canadian prosecution of a conservative author for alleged anti-Muslim human rights violations. Fox chose to interview Paul Fromm, who was very identified as a "Free Speech Activist." Fromm is Canada's most notorious extremist: he's a white supremacist, a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite

read more | digg story

Martial LAW in the USA! It has started! Can you believe it?

I thought that this was against the Constitution. Digg this up so everyone is aware. Coming to a city near you!

read more | digg story

House Party Ends in Shouting, Tears

House Party Ends in Shouting, Tears

Last night, I went to one of the Unite for Change House parties for Barack Obama at the home of my hair stylist. She's an Aquarian Moon, so the assembled was a diverse mix of young, middle-aged, old, black, white, gay, straight, tattooed and conservative looking...somebody dropped the F-bomb in reference to Obama's recent reversal -- a decision not to accept public funding. That means he'll rely on private funds, with all the strings that are usually attached to that cash...This firebrand participant caused the room to explode, with people talking out of turn, and steering the conversation into dark, despairing comments like, "Who really runs this country?", "Do the people have a voice?, and "Are the two parties that different anymore?"

Every now and then, someone tried to look on the bright side, but was quickly reminded of the real mess we're in. It seemed like there was no going back to cheery American-style pretending that one man could fix it. The young Obama staffer lost control of the living room audience, started to tear up, and ran out. She later came back, but could not stop crying. There was no resolution, and I left feeling jarred, but like I had been part of something very real. It felt like a dysfunctional family grasping in the dark, and considering whether to stage an intervention. It left me feeling a wee bit of hope.

(c) Laura Rauch

David Icke - Big Brother, the Big Picture (Hull July 2008)

David Icke speaks to the constituents of Haltemprice and Howden about the 'Big Brother' election, forced by the resignation of David Davis, and the move towards the global Big Brother enslavement we are all facing.

read more | digg story

Another Inventor Of The Internet Wants To Gag It

Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title:" Inventor of the Internet" in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer filesharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and — you guessed it — can throttle them in favor of other, more 'high-priority' traffic."

read more | digg story

W. House ignored FBI concerns on prisoner abuse -probe | Reuters

Top Bush administration security officials ignored FBI concerns over abusive treatment of terrorism suspects, which one agent called "borderline torture," a four-year Justice Department probe found.

The FBI, alarmed by interrogation techniques such as the use of snarling dogs, sexual provocation and forced nudity, clashed with the Defense Department and CIA over their use, said the 370-page report, released on Tuesday by the Justice Department's inspector general.

Congress in 2005 banned the inhumane treatment of prisoners, and the CIA says it has not used "waterboarding," a form of simulated drowning, in five years. But Bush in March vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other abusive techniques.

The new report quotes an FBI agent as objecting that the CIA's interrogation of suspected senior al Qaeda commander Abu Zubaydah was "borderline torture," and said at one point an agent helped care for him in the hospital "even to the point of cleaning him up after bowel movements."

Specific interrogation techniques for Abu Zubaydah were blacked out in the report as classified information, but the CIA has acknowledged he was one of three suspects subjected to waterboarding.

Food Rationing Happening in the United States » Propeller

FOOD RATIONINGMajor retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply.

The curbs and shortages are being tracked with concern by survivalists who view the phenomenon as a harbinger of more serious trouble to come.

"It's sporadic. It's not every store, but it's becoming more commonplace," the editor of SurvivalBlog.com, James Rawles, said. "The number of reports I've been getting from readers who have seen signs posted with limits has increased almost exponentially, I'd say in the last three to five weeks."

DEAD CERTAIN: The Presidency of George W. Bush

The use of torture and cruel treatment has actually hurt American national security. It has aroused outrage around the world, alarming friends and allies, depriving the United States of its reputation as a country that does not resort to inhumanity.

read more | digg story