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Google accused of criminal intent over StreetView data

Friday, June 11th, 2010

*note from Vanversive* For a while now I have been using startpage.com and using things like facebook and twitter less and less. Since google and companies like it literally record everything you do in hopes of creating a virtual version of you that can predict things you may or may not do in order to sell you something or worse. startpage.com is one of the few search engines that protects your privacy, something I believe will be a legend, yes I said legend when our grandchildren are in their twenties. All this really has nothing to do with the article below, just thought id get that out.

BBC News
June 10, 2010

Google is “almost certain” to face prosecution for collecting data from unsecured wi-fi networks, according to Privacy International (PI).

The search giant has been under scrutiny for collecting wi-fi data as part of its StreetView project.

Google has released an independent audit of the rogue code, which it has claimed was included in the StreetView software by mistake. But PI is convinced the audit proves “criminal intent”.

“The independent audit of the Google system shows that the system used for the wi-fi collection intentionally separated out unencrypted content (payload data) of communications and systematically wrote this data to hard drives. This is equivalent to placing a hard tap and a digital recorder onto a phone wire without consent or authorisation,” said PI in a statement.

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Christian preacher on hooligan charge after saying he believes that homosexuality is a sin

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Mail Online

A Christian street preacher has been arrested and charged with a public-order offence after saying that homosexuality was sinful.

Dale Mcalpine was handing out leaflets to shoppers when he told a passer-by and a gay police community support officer that, as a Christian, he believed homosexuality was one of a number of sins that go against the word of God.

Mr Mcalpine said that he did not repeat his remarks on homosexuality when he preached from the top of a stepladder after his leafleting.

But he has been told that police officers are alleging they heard him making his remarks to a member of the public in a loud voice that could be overheard by others.

Mr Mcalpine, 42, who earns about £40,000 a year in the energy industry, was arrested and taken to the local police station in the back of a police van after preaching in the Cumbrian town of Workington on April 20.

After seven hours locked up in a cell, he was charged with using abusive or insulting words or behaviour contrary to the Public Order Act 1986.

Mr Mcalpine – who has delivered open-air sermons and handed out leaflets in Workington for years, and has never been in trouble with the police – said the incident was one of the worst moments of his life.

‘I felt deeply shocked and humiliated that I had been arrested in my own town and treated like a common criminal in front of people I know,’ he said.

‘My freedom was taken away on the hearsay of someone who disliked what I said, and I was charged under a law that doesn’t apply.’

He said he was not homophobic and has gay friends, but he feels compelled by his faith to urge people to abandon all types of sins so they can seek salvation.

‘If you are preaching hate and calling on people to harm others, it is right that is against the law,’ he said. ‘But I would never do that. If we have a free society, I should be allowed to preach the Gospel as generations have before me.’

Christian campaigners said last night they were alarmed that the police seemed to be using legislation originally introduced to deal with violent and abusive rioters and football hooligans to curb free speech.

Neil Addison, a barrister and expert on religious law, said: ‘People should be able to express their opinions freely as long as their conduct is reasonable. In fact, it is part of the duty of the police to protect free speech.’

Mike Judge, a spokesman for the Christian Institute, which is supporting Mr Mcalpine, said: ‘Dale is an ordinary, everyday Christian with traditional views about sexual ethics.

‘Some people will agree with him, others will disagree. But it’s not for the police to arrest someone just because others may disagree with what is said.’

Mr Mcalpine’s ordeal began when he and two other Christians went to the pedestrianised shopping precinct in the centre of Workington.

He took a small stepladder and a rucksack of Christian leaflets and met full-time preacher Keith Bullock from Carlisle and a friend from his evangelical church in Workington.

Mr Bullock began speaking from the stepladder outside a mobile phone shop close to
a number of stores and coffee bars.


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Posted in Censorship, Freedom of Speech, Politics, Privacy | No Responses »
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Dems spark alarm with call for national ID card

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

By Alexander Bolton
The Hill

A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation’s immigration laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.

Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.

The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.

It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases.

“The cardholder’s identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the microprocessing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer,” states the Democratic legislative proposal.

The American Civil Liberties Union, a civil liberties defender often aligned with the Democratic Party, wasted no time in blasting the plan.

“Creating a biometric national ID will not only be astronomically expensive, it will usher government into the very center of our lives. Every worker in America will need a government permission slip in order to work. And all of this will come with a new federal bureaucracy — one that combines the worst elements of the DMV and the TSA,” said Christopher Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel.

“America’s broken immigration system needs real, workable reform, but it cannot come at the expense of privacy and individual freedoms,” Calabrese added.

The ACLU said “if the biometric national ID card provision of the draft bill becomes law, every worker in America would have to be fingerprinted.”

A source at one pro-immigration reform group described the proposal as “Orwellian.”

But Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), who has worked on the proposal and helped unveil it at a press conference Thursday, predicted the public has become more comfortable with the idea of a national identification card.

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Google: U.S. Demanded User Info 3,500 Times in 6 Months

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

By Ryan Singel
Wired

Search engines and ISPs have for years refused to tell the public how many times the cops and feds have forced them to turn over information on users.

Google broke that unwritten code of silence Tuesday, unveiling a Government Requests Tool that shows the public how often individual governments around the world have asked for user information, and how often they’ve asked Google to remove content from their sites or search index, for reasons other than copyright violation.

The answer for U.S. users is 3,580 total requests for information over a six-month period from July 2009 to December 2009. That number comes to about 20 a day, and includes subpoenas and search warrants from state, local and federal law enforcement officials. Brazil just edges out the U.S. in the number of requests for data about users, with 3,663 over those six months. That’s due to the continuing Brazilian popularity of Google’s social networking site, Orkut.

Google VP David Drummond announced the tool in a blog post Tuesday, casting it as a tool to cut down on censorship — not surprising, given that Google says it’s been censored by 25 of the 100 countries it operates in.

[G]overnment censorship of the web is growing rapidly: from the outright blocking and filtering of sites, to court orders limiting access to information and legislation forcing companies to self-censor content.

So it’s no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from our services. Of course many of these requests are entirely legitimate, such as requests for the removal of child pornography. We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship.

Google is also releasing information about the number of times governments ask the company to take down content or remove links. These include requests to take down defamatory videos, such as the one that led to prosecution of Google executives in Italy. The statistics do not include requests based on copyright or from reports of child pornography, since Google automatically takes down the latter whenever it detects it.

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Posted in Internet, Net neutrality, Police State, Privacy | No Responses »
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Jesse Ventura on Real Time

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Jason Van Gilder
vanversive.net

Ventura on real time, where they go over the drug war, his new book, and third parties. They really hit hard on the third party which is good, goes with what I talked about on last nights Resistance Radio. They also talk about things like alternative voting, the electoral college, and more. A third party has become a hot topic this year, all the big networks are forced to talk about it. Networks like Russia Today have been talking about it for years, but now its so hard for our main stream media to ignore. Its thanks to people like Jesse Ventura and Ron Paul for getting the message out there, and I know there are countless others who have spent blood sweat and tears to get the info out there.

Posted in 9/11, Privacy, libertarianism, vanversive.net | No Responses »
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Bush’s Illegal Wiretapping Tab: $612,000

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

By David Kravets
Wired

The two American lawyers who were illegally wiretapped by the Bush administration asked a federal judge Friday to order the government to pay $612,000 in damages, plus legal fees for their attorneys.

The demand (.pdf) comes two weeks after U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said the former administration wiretapped the lawyers’ telephone conversations (.pdf) without a warrant, in violation of federal law.

It was the first ruling addressing how Bush’s once-secret NSA spy program, adopted in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, was carried out against American citizens. Other lawsuits considered the program’s overall constitutionality — absent any evidence of specific eavesdropping — and were dismissed.

The government in 2004 was intercepting the telephone communications of lawyers Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor. They were counsel to a Saudi charity, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, which the government has declared a terror organization.

They learned of the eavesdropping after the government erroneously sent them records. Both the Bush and the Obama administrations declared those records state secrets, so the documents were removed from the case.

Walker allowed the case to proceed, based on other evidence of eavesdropping (.pdf).

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School District Allegedly Snapped Thousands of Student Webcam Spy Pics

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

By David Kravets
Wired

A webcam spying scandal at a suburban Philadelphia school district is broadening, with lawyers claiming the district secretly snapped thousands of webcam images of students using school-issued laptops without the pupils’ knowledge or consent.

Some of the images included pictures of youths at home, in bed or even “partially dressed,” according to a Thursday filing in the case. Pupils’ online chats were also captured, as well as a record of the websites they visited.
Pennsylvania high school officials are accused of spying on their students through webcams on district issued Macbooks. Here is a picture a webcam took of a sophmore sleeping at home

When the story first broke in February, the district said the cameras were activated only handful of times when a laptop was reported stolen or missing — an assertion lawyers suing the district say is false.

“Discovery to date has now revealed that thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots (.pdf) have been taken from numerous other students in their homes, many of which never reported their laptops lost or missing,” attorney Mark Haltzman wrote in a Thursday federal court filing.

In February, the Lower Merion School District deactivated the webcam-tracking program secretly lodged on 2,300 student laptops.

The move came a day after the 6,900-pupil district, which provides students from its two high schools free MacBooks, was sued in federal court on allegations it was undertaking a dragnet surveillance program targeting its students — an allegation the district has repeatedly denied.

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Posted in Nanny State, Police State, Privacy | No Responses »
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Best episode of Larry King I have ever seen!

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

Jason Van Gilder
vanversive.net

Jesse ventura hosted this episode while Larry was away. He has an all star panel including Stephanie Miller, Ron Paul, Rod Blagojevich, and Andrea Tantaros. They go into such topics like, Stupak stepping down, tiger woods, Big Government, Censorship, and more.

I particularly like the part where Jesse smacks down the mains stream media for covering Anna Nicole Smith for a whole month. Ron Paul also brings balance to this with his libertarian philosophies which seem to resonate with Ventura as well being a libertarian himself. All in all great episode, almost wish Jesse was a host all the time. In the mean time I have his new book American Conspiracies to read and heard his show conspiracy theory got picked up for a second season.

Part 2

Part 3

part 4


Part 5

Posted in 9/11, Censorship, Drug War, Politics, Privacy, Ron Paul, libertarianism, vanversive.net | No Responses »
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Olbermann can no longer ignore tyranny

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

Jason Van Gilder
vanversive.net

Well here it is, Keith can no longer praise Obama forever. In this video they talk about the president authorizing the right to assassinate American citizens if they feel they could be a terrorist so far away from the battlefield. The idea that an American citizen can be killed without trial in front of a judge or peers, without any form of habeas corpus is scary. Combine this with Mccain’s bill to label “enemy belligerents” and you have a cocktail for Tyranny.

This should scare anybody who is out there protesting what our government has been doing peacefully. With CNN and MSNBC out there trying to label the tea parties and other like it (911 truth) as violent and possible terrorists is appalling. At least Keith couldn’t keep quite for very long, despite his master who may or may not want him to report on it. Keith should take a note from Dylan Ratigan who has been reporting the news on the banksters, and more for a long time now.

Posted in Police State, Politics, Privacy, War, vanversive.net | No Responses »
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IRS chief: Buy health insurance or lose your tax refund

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

By Gautham Nagesh
The Daily Caller

Individuals who don’t purchase health insurance may lose their tax refunds according to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. After acknowledging the recently passed health-care bill limits the agency’s options for enforcing the individual mandate, Shulman told reporters that the most likely way to penalize individuals that don’t comply is by reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, Shulman downplayed the IRS’s role in enforcing the recent overhaul of the health insurance industry by claiming the agency would not aggressively target individuals who don’t purchase coverage. He noted that the health-care bill expressly forbids the agency from freezing bank accounts, seizing assets or pursuing criminal charges, but when pressed said the IRS would most likely use tax refund offsets to penalize those that don’t comply with the mandate. The IRS uses refund offsets to collect from individuals that owe the federal government a delinquent debt.

“These are not the kinds of things we send agents out about,” Shulman said. “These are things where you get a letter from us. Congress was very careful to make sure there was nothing too punitive in this bill.”

Many reports have claimed that enforcement of the individual mandate will be non-existent, but Shulman’s answers indicate differently. According to BusinessWeek, starting in 2015 Americans who don’t purchase insurance will be subject to a fine of $325 and that sum increases to $695 in 2016. However, the commissioner seemed confident that in most cases individuals would either receive subsidies to purchase insurance or simply do so on their own in order to comply with the law.

“The vast majority of American people have a healthy respect for the law and want to be compliant with their tax obligations,” Shulman said, mentioning letters, collection notices and offsets as among the various ways the IRS will reach out to people without coverage.

During his speech Shulman said threats against the IRS have not risen despite media reports to the contrary. He disagreed that it has become more dangerous to work for the IRS following the February incident in which a disgruntled pilot flew his plane into the agency’s Austin, Texas office, killing one employee.

“There’s been a lot of stuff in the press around increased threats, which is actually inaccurate,” Shulman said. “What there has been is increased chatter on the Internet that has an anti-government sentiment.”

He also said it is too early to know what additional resources or how many employees the IRS will need to enforce compliance with the mandate and clarified his reasons for using a professional tax preparer.

“I wouldn’t read into anything about me doing it now,” Shulman said. “I’m just a busy guy and have had good service for the past 15 years.”

Posted in Health, Nanny State, Politics, Privacy | No Responses »
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