Showing posts with label Big Brother. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big Brother. Show all posts

Monday, August 5, 2013

For Twitter, Free Speech Is a High-Wire Act

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Twitter Inc.'s growing ambitions are making it harder to carry the Internet's free-speech banner.

Chief Executive Dick Costolo promotes Twitter as a protector of more than 200 million people who broadcast their lives, be it love for a new pop song or Tahrir Square protests. But increasingly, freewheeling tweets are clashing with divergent global laws and standards in markets where Twitter is spreading its wings.

"You have to abide by the rule of law in the countries in which you operate," the 49-year-old Mr. Costolo said in an interview at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters. Defending free expression "gets more challenging for us as a company as we become an ever-growing global company, and have a presence and offices and people on the ground around the world."

In recent weeks, Twitter has found itself labeled a censor, an enabler of hate speech and a tool of Big Brother. It drew flak in July for turning over to French prosecutors information about users who tweeted anti-Semitic messages.  Read more >>
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Monday, June 24, 2013

Meet The Man In Charge Of America's Secret Cyber Army

Keith Alexander, director of the NSA.
Keith Alexander, director of the NSA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
With his revelations exposing the extent of potential, and actual, pervasive NSA surveillance over the American population, Edward Snowden has done a great service for the public by finally forcing it to answer the question: is having Big Brother peek at every private communication and electronic information, a fair exchange for the alleged benefit of the state's security. Alas, without further action form a population that appears largely numb and apathetic to disclosures that until recently would have sparked mass protests and toppled presidents, the best we can hope for within a political regime that has hijacked the democratic process, is some intense introspection as to what the concept of "America" truly means.

However, and more importantly, what Snowden's revelations have confirmed, is that behind the scenes, America is now actively engaged in a new kind of war: an unprecedented cyber war, where collecting, deciphering, intercepting, and abusing information is the only thing that matters and leads to unprecedented power, and where enemies both foreign and domestic may be targeted without due process based on a lowly analyst's "whim."

It has also put spotlight on the man, who until recently deep in the shadows, has been responsible for building America's secret, absolutely massive cyber army, and which according to a just released Wired profile is "capable of launching devastating cyberattacks. Now it's ready to unleash hell."

Meet General Keith Alexander, "a man few even in Washington would likely recognize", which is troubling because Alexander is now quite possibly the most powerful person in the world, that nobody talks about. Which is just the way he likes it. Read more >>
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Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Sales Of George Orwell's 1984 Have Surged 6884% In The Last 24 Hours

In the last 24 hours, sales of the 'big brother' book 1984 on Amazon.com have soared by almost 7000% as the reality of the surveillance state come to the public's attention. As Liberty Blitzkrieg's Mike Krieger notes, we suppose it makes sense that people would want to get up to speed on the dystopian world being constructed rapidly and secretly around them. 1984 is now the 4th fastest rising sales book and 184th most popular on Amazon! Read more >>

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Friday, June 7, 2013

America's largest companies are collaborating with the biggest GOVT spying operation in history

Headquarters of the NSA at Fort Meade, Marylan...
Headquarters of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. 
The disclosures involving this (and the prior) administration's Big Brother surveillance state, which would make Nixon blush with envy are now coming fast and furious (one wonders - why now: even that bastion of liberalism the NY Times, has turned against Obama).

Although while the Guardian's overnight news that Verizon (and most certainly AT&T as well among others) was cooperating with the NSA on spying on US citizens, so far at least the internet seemed, if only to the great unwashed masses, immune.

That is no longer the case following news from the WaPo exposing PRISM, a highly classified program, which has not been disclosed publicly before. "Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy."

What PRISM does is to allow the NSA and the FBI to tap directly "into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time." Read more >>
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Thursday, November 1, 2012

TSA Agent arrested for raping boy he mentored as a big brother


We've learned a Transportation Security Agent has been arrested on a warrant for the rape of a northeast Ohio boy he had been mentoring as a big brother.

The man had been a volunteer with the Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Greater Cleveland.

Cleveland Sex Crimes investigators built a case against him, and he was arrested at the airport in Newark, NJ.

He had gone to work for the TSA in Germany.

We're not naming the man until he gets brought back to Cleveland and charged.

Source

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