Michelle Obama has nearly 2 million fake Twitter followers

Nearly 2 million of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Twitter followers are not real. According to the Twitter analytics application Status People, 37 percent of Michelle Obama’s 5,290, 506 Twitter followers — or approximately 1,957,487 followers — are considered fake. Thirty-five percent of her followers are inactive, and 28 percent are considered “good,” or real.

Michelle Obama’s account is run by Organizing for Action, and sent its last Tweet on March 4. It was a retweet of a message sent by the Twitter account of the First Lady’s Let’s Move initiative.

The official Twitter account for the Office of the First Lady is @FLOTUS. Only 25 percent of the account’s 513,026 followers are considered fake. 38 percent are inactive, and 37 percent are considered “good.” Read more >>

Syrian Electronic Army hacks US Marine website

US Marines received a message calling for support from their “brothers, the Syrian army soldiers” – in the form of a web attack from the Syrian Electronic Army.

Changing the homepage of an official Marines recruitment website www.marines.com to a page entitled “Hacked by SEA”, the message read: “Dear US Marines… We understand your patriotism and love for your country so please understand our love for ours.

“Obama is a traitor who wants to put your lives in danger to rescue Al-Qa'ida insurgents… The Syrian army should be your ally not your enemy.

“Refuse your orders and concentrate on the real reason every soldier joins their military, to defend their homeland. You’re more than welcome to fight alongside our army rather than against it.” Read more >>

Robocop a step closer- Google Glass App for police

Google Glass has lots of potential applications beyond just making it easier for people to check out their Twitter feed without taking their phones out of their pockets. Mutualink is demoing one such app today at APCO, a conference for public safety communications, with its Glass App for police, firefighters and first responders.

The app would allow public safety officers and officials to communicate in real-time via streaming video from the scene, as well as to receive and view key documents, including things like building schematics, medical records of victims, live feeds of security cameras in the area and more. It’s the ultimate on-demand intel platform for agents working in the field, and a way to stay in contact with HQ and other organizations even when radio systems won’t talk to each other.

Of course, there could be privacy concerns with such an app. Recently, news came out that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other officials in the U.S. oppose the idea of police body cameras, suggesting they’d be open to all kinds of dangerous interpretation. Mutualink says its solution emphasizes agency control of media and recording on glass, so privacy would be in the hands of the cops and other officials using them and should be protected.

A tactical heads-up display being used by safety officers is a natural fit for Glass, and as the enforcement agents would be using the head-mounted computer as part of their uniform, they wouldn’t have to worry about looking like idiots, so this could be a place where Google actually finds some long-term adoption. Mutualink is also already a service provider used by NATO Special Operations Forces, homeland security, police and fire departments, so it has the relationships in place to make this happen. Read more >>

For Twitter, Free Speech Is a High-Wire Act

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 >>

Death of Privacy

Imagine the government passed a law requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would immediately be found unconstitutional. Yet we all carry mobile phones.

If the National Security Agency required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded copies of all our conversations and correspondence, it would be laughed at. Yet we provide copies of our e-mail to Google, Microsoft or whoever our mail host is; we provide copies of our text messages to Verizon, AT&T and Sprint; and we provide copies of other conversations to Twitter Inc., Facebook, LinkedIn or whatever other site is hosting them.

The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government’s intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. Understanding how we got here is critical to understanding how we undo the damage.

Computers and networks inherently produce data, and our constant interactions with them allow corporations to collect an enormous amount of intensely personal data about us as we go about our daily lives. Sometimes we produce this data inadvertently simply by using our phones, credit cards, computers and other devices. Sometimes we give corporations this data directly on Google, Facebook, Apple Inc.’s iCloud and so on in exchange for whatever free or cheap service we receive from the Internet in return. Read more >>

Faltering Economy in China Dims Job Prospects for Graduates

China's FIRST McDonald's (Photo credit: flickr.Marcus)

A record seven million students will graduate from universities and colleges across China in the coming weeks, but their job prospects appear bleak — the latest sign of a troubled Chinese economy.

Businesses say they are swamped with job applications but have few positions to offer as economic growth has begun to falter. Twitter-like microblogging sites in China are full of laments from graduates with dim prospects.

The Chinese government is worried, saying that the problem could affect social stability, and it has ordered schools, government agencies and state-owned enterprises to hire more graduates at least temporarily to help relieve joblessness. “The only thing that worries them more than an unemployed low-skilled person is an unemployed educated person,” said Shang-Jin Wei, a Columbia Business School economist.

Lu Mai, the secretary general of the elite, government-backed China Development Research Foundation, acknowledged in a speech this month that less than half of this year’s graduates had found jobs so far. Read more >>

Study: One-Third Of Recent Marriages Occurred Between Online Courtships

A new study offered by researchers at the University of Chicago and reviewed by a team at Harvard University shows that a third of recent marriages happen between couples who met online. For the study, researchers examined a sampling of marriages of over 19,000 people that occurred between 2005 and 2012.

Of the couples that participated, the research teams found that 35 percent of those marriages occurred between couples who found one another through the Internet. The type of sites that connected the future spouses varied, U.S. News & World Report learned. Approximately half of those who met online did so through dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony.

Out of the other half, 20 percent reportedly met through social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook, while 15 percent met through communication-based online mediums such as email and chat rooms. Read more >>

Chase denies hacking in vanishing balances

Chase Bank experienced technical difficulties for over an hour Monday night, worrying customers who logged into their accounts and saw their balance at $0 or were unable to get any access to them at all.

A spokesman for the bank said it was strictly an internal technical issue and customers' accounts were not in danger.

"The problems are an issue with the checking account portion of chase.com, nothing to do with mortgage or credit banking. We have a technology problem regarding customers balance information that we are working to resolve," the spokesman to CBS News. "It has nothing to do with cyber threats or hacks. It is an internal issue. We are very sorry to our customers for the inconvenience."

Within two hours, the bank tweeted that the issue was resolved. Customers reported seeing their balances once again.

Still, hundreds of Chase users expressed their frustration on Twitter and Facebook. Many reported seeing their account balances listed as "$0" on mobile devices, while others said they got a "System Unavail" message when logged into the bank's website on their computers. Read more >>

Greek Youth Unemployment Tops 60%

Optimism it seems is all that matters (or is all that is allowed) as we are battered by dismal data left, right, and center. Of course, a reflection on the markets tells any 'smart' person that it all must get better - or why would stocks or sovereigns, or EURUSD be where it is?

However, the 6 out of 10 15-24 year olds in Greece (61.7% to be exact) would beg to differ with that view of the world (as their economy grinds to a halt) - and with Spain reaching new highs at 55.6% (as well as the Euro-zone over 24%), all the bureaucratic lip-service in the world won't stop the revolt that is coming we fear. Read more >>

Software Predicts Future Behavior

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.

A video obtained by the Guardian reveals how an "extreme-scale analytics" system created by Raytheon, the world's fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

Raytheon says it has not sold the software - named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology - to any clients. But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing "trillions of entities" from cyberspace.

The power of Riot to harness websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns. Read more >>

Are tax benefits of 401(k) plans on the chopping block?

As the debate around tax reform grows more heated, broker-dealers and other companies that service retirement plans offered by employers are increasingly concerned that the tax benefits of 401(k) plans are on the chopping block.

An industry group that normally works behind the scenes, the American Society of Pension Professionals and Actuaries, on Monday launched a media campaign intended to educate U.S. employers and workers that the federal government might consider changing the tax benefits of retirement savings accounts.


That worries the ASPPA because Americans might end up saving less, and some smaller employers might eventually decide to discontinue their own 401(k) plans.

The "Save My 401(k)" campaign includes a website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and even an online videogame. The budget is undisclosed but is in the six figures, according to the ASPPA's chief executive, Brian Graff. Read more >>

Saudi women monitored with electronic tracking

Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements.

Since last week, Saudi women's male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are travelling together.

Manal al-Sherif, who became the symbol of a campaign launched last year urging Saudi women to defy a driving ban, began spreading the information on Twitter, after she was alerted by a couple.

The husband, who was travelling with his wife, received a text message from the immigration authorities informing him that his wife had left the international airport in Riyadh.

"The authorities are using technology to monitor women," said columnist Badriya al-Bishr, who criticised the "state of slavery under which women are held" in the ultra-conservative kingdom. Read more >>

Secret Service Asks Americans to Spy on Twitter Users

The Secret Service has expanded its operation to Twitter, urging Americans to report on their fellow citizens whose tweets “concern you.”

“To report a tweet that concerns you, call the nearest field office in your state,” the Secret Service tweeted on Oct. 23.  The agency then links to a list of contact numbers for Field Offices in each state.

The Secret Service sent another tweet on Wednesday, again asking its followers to report tweets.  “Contact your nearest field office with time-sensitive or critical info or to report a tweet,” it said.

The agency has accrued more than 44,000 followers since joining the social media platform on May 9, 2011.  Twitter surpassed 500 million user accounts around the world earlier this year, 140 million of which are in the U.S. Read more >>

Without BLS “adjustments” the real unemployment rate is 23%

They use a birth/death model to create jobs out of thin air, later adjusting those phantom jobs away in a press release on a Friday night. They create new categories of Americans to pretend they aren’t really unemployed.

They use more models to make adjustments for seasonality. Then they make massive one-time adjustments for the Census. Essentially, you can conclude that anything the BLS reports on a monthly basis is a wild ass guess, massaged to present the most optimistic view of the world.

The government preferred unemployment rate of 8.3% is a terrible joke and the MSM dutifully spouts this drivel to a zombie-like public. If the governing elite were to report the truth, the public would realize we are in the midst of a 2nd Great Depression.

The unemployment rate during the Great Depression reached 25%. Without the BLS “adjustments” the real unemployment rate in this country is 23%. Read more >>

Peter Schiff: Heading For Economic Collapse No Matter Who Wins The Election

Who Owns Your Tweets?

Who owns your tweets? What about all that personal information you’ve given Twitter? Or tweets you deleted? Or drafts you saved? Those questions are the focus of a battle Twitter is waging with a New York State judge.

Twitter says that its users own their tweets, and all that personal information. The court says Twitter does, and should hand them over when subpoenaed. This week Twitter has filed an appeal to New York Supreme Court, the second time it’s filed a motion in this case. Bottom line: Twitter says that it makes it clear in its terms of services that users own their content and they have “a right to fight invalid government requests,” i.e. subpoenas.

Twitter’s appeal argues that users have a property right to the content they post and have a Fourth Amendment privacy right to their accounts. The company says that deleted Tweets are not public, and that Twitter accounts should have the same protection as personal email accounts. Read more >>

10 Things We Can Learn From Egypt About Preparing for Economic Collapse

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com
As riots spread across the world, having started first in Europe and now engulfing the Middle East, most people in the U.S. outright reject the possibility that the same could happen right here at home. But the fact of the matter is that we remain in economic crisis and there is a real possibility of a total collapse of the system we have come to know.

If the system does happen to collapse, be it because of a hyperinflationary currency meltdown, political uprising or anything in between, here are ten things you can expect to happen, just as they are happening in the Middle East today:

How the Corporate Media is Snookering You on Syria

For those versed in the black arts of propaganda, the hijacking of Arab Spring must be a beauteous thing to behold. First came evidently spontaneous uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Then some up-and-comer in Washington or London or Paris had a brainstorm, a new twist on a very old idea: if you can’t beat em, join em. Or even better, co-opt them, and use them for your own purposes.

The old way of getting rid of “inconvenient” leaders was so 20th-century—in the case of Saddam Hussein, a monstrous lie followed by a massive bloodletting on both sides. Tahrir Square suggested how to bring down a regime in a manner far less costly and far more palatable to the public: lots of medium-sized and little lies, war through Twitter, war through expendable proxies. Provide financial incentives to key figures to publicly renounce the old leadership, create a steady stream of heart-rending moments and photos and allegations, generate endless “human rights violations” by baiting the government into a military response, then very publicly petition international bodies for redress of humanitarian concerns. Read more>>

Nearly One in Five EU Residents Struggle to Cope Financially

John Chapman and Femke De Keulenaer

BRUSSELS -- In July 2009, at a time when several European economies were just coming out of recession, nearly one in five (18%) European Union residents said their household had at some time in the past year run out of money to pay ordinary bills or to buy food or other daily consumer items.

Romanians (45%) and Latvians (40%) were most likely to say they had run out of money to pay for essential goods and services in the 12 months before the survey. In a number of other eastern European countries, such as Hungary, Bulgaria, and Lithuania, about a third of respondents said their household had gone through a similar experience. However, far fewer residents reported such problems in Denmark (5%), the Netherlands (8%), Sweden and Luxembourg (both 9%), and Germany (10%).

Looking ahead to the next 12 months, slightly more than one-quarter (26%) of EU residents expected their household's financial situation to deteriorate. More than half (55%) of respondents expected that their household's financial situation would be stable and 16% anticipated that their household's financial situation would improve.

Residents in Latvia (65%) and Lithuania (58%) were the most likely to expect their household's financial situation to be worse in the 12 months following the poll. At least 4 in 10 residents expected the same in Hungary (48%), Ireland (43%), Estonia, Greece, and Romania (all 41%).

Among the least likely to be pessimistic about their household's future financial situation (that is, thinking it would deteriorate) were those in Denmark (10%), Finland and Sweden (both 15%), Luxembourg (17%), and Austria (18%). Furthermore, at the time of the survey, at least one in five respondents in Sweden (24%) and Denmark (21%) expected an improvement in their household's financial situation in the year to come.

The EU residents most likely to expect their household's financial problems to get worse in the next 12 months were the unemployed (33%), retirees (31%), and those aged 55 and older (31%). Furthermore, 42% of those residents who had been unable to pay essential bills thought their household situation would get worse, compared with 23% of those who never had that experience.

These results show the picture of how EU residents were coping with the effects of the financial crisis in July 2009. Early next year, we will publish another article on this same topic.

Eurobarometer Reports

Gallup conducts Flash Eurobarometer surveys for the European Commission. These surveys enable European policymakers to hear the voices of EU residents in the 27 member states. Gallup has worked with the Commission on more than 90 Flash Eurobarometer surveys (with close to 1.5 million interviews) on subjects from the euro to consumer protection and from higher education to the financial crisis.

Read the full report online.

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CIA, FBI, Even IRS, Monitor MySpace, Twitter, Facebook

No surprise here.
NYT
The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters. A public interest group has filed a lawsuit to learn more about this monitoring, in the hope of starting a national discussion and modifying privacy laws as necessary for the online era.

Law enforcement is not saying a lot about its social surveillance, but examples keep coming to light. The Wall Street Journal reported this summer that state revenue agents have been searching for tax scofflaws by mining information on MySpace and Facebook. In October, the F.B.I. searched the New York home of a man suspected of helping coordinate protests at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh by sending out messages over Twitter.

In some cases, the government appears to be engaged in deception. The Boston Globe recently quoted a Massachusetts district attorney as saying that some police officers were going undercover on Facebook as part of their investigations.

Wired magazine reported last month that In-Q-Tel, an investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, has put money into Visible Technologies, a software company that crawls across blogs, online forums, and open networks like Twitter and YouTube to monitor what is being said.

This month the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law sued the Department of Defense, the C.I.A. and other federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act to learn more about their use of social networking sites. More...