Governing Ourselves

One company served with an NSL earlier this year is pushing back on this request for silence. Wired reports that it wants to tell its customers that their information has been requested by the government and give them the opportunity to take it to court, should they wish. This “minor defiance,” Wired states, has caused the government to file a request that the company, which remains unnamed, be forced to remain quiet because speaking out “may endanger the national security of the United States.”
Wired has more on a case that it believes “shed a little light” on NSLs post-9/11 when they were reformed to not require a court order and come with forced gag orders on companies

In fiscal 2011, the cost of the promises grew from $30.9 trillion to $33.8 trillion. To put that in context, consider that the total value of companies traded on U.S. stock markets is $13.1 trillion, based on the Wilshire 5000 index, and the value of the equity in U.S. taxpayers’ homes, according to Freddie Mac, is $6.2 trillion. Said another way, there is not enough wealth in America to meet those promises. If the government followed corporate accounting rules, that $2.9 trillion increase would be added to the $1.3 trillion cash deficit for fiscal 2011 that has been widely reported. And a $4.2 trillion deficit is something that Americans need to know about....

t was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who warned that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act "would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world." Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argue that the bills give the Feds unacceptable "power to censor the Web."

But these companies have yet to roll out the heavy artillery.

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you'll know they're finally serious.

A new technology called ShotSpotter enables law enforcement officials to precisely and instantaneously locate shooters, and it has been quietly rolling out across America. From Long Island, N.Y., to San Francisco, Calif., more than 60 cities in the U.S. have been leveraging ShotSpotter to make their streets safer.

The Bartlesville Municipal Authority heard a presentation by Water Utilities Director Mike Hall about a proposed automated meter reading project.

It’s time for a different type of redneck joke. Rednecks know who they are, and have been very tolerant of mockery, and they don’t require the jokes to come from another redneck, lest you be killed.

Take a look at these and ask yourself, am I a redneck?

You might be a redneck if: It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, ‘One nation under God.’ ....

Time lapse animation of the demolition of 660 W. Division, one of the last remaining buildings within the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago.

At the instigation of a mentally unbalanced bee-keeper, the similarly unbalanced European Court (EuGH), the highest court in the EUSSR, is considering whether honeybees are allowed to approach genetically modified plants and take their pollen.

Twelve state and local water agencies in Southern California are suing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its arbitrary decision last July to double the size of the habitat for a small algae-eating fish known as the Santa Ana Sucker. Wielding the all-purpose Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's no-explanation decision plants a Godzilla-sized footprint over local efforts to conserve the fish and its environment. But worse, it will cut water supplies for up to 3 million citizens in Southern California's Inland Empire region, raising water prices and straining water supplies elsewhere all in the name of "conservation." It's nothing but a power grab that will leave a new round of economic and environmental wreckage.

The documents we uncovered show that the Obama FCC was deeply involved in discussions with the radical leftist organization Free Press in the run up to the December 2010 FCC vote. How deep? Free Press reached out to the FCC to invite FCC Commissioner Michael Copps to write an op-ed for the Albuquerque Journal in advance of a November 16 hearing on Internet Access. Free Press helped coordinate a speaker's list for FCC "Internet workshops" — which was a "Who's Who" of liberal activists. ... Allow me to introduce you to the people who seem to be running the FCC's Internet policies ... Two socialists, a radical feminist, and a left-wing eccentric billionaire who uses his wealth to drive the liberal agenda ... Proponents of net neutrality, like Free Press, believe Internet access is a civil right. And what happens when you make something a civil right? You put the government in charge of "protecting" those rights. In the case of net neutrality, proponents want taxpayer-funded online access for everyone, most especially communities they deem "underserved." This, of course, would require government control. If allowed to move forward, the Left's version of "net neutrality" could stifle innovation by preventing Internet service providers from managing their information networks with any flexibility. And it could effectively kill the digital economy.

Iarpa, the intelligence community's way-out research shop, wants to know where you took that vacation picture over the Fourth of July. It wants to know where you took that snapshot with your friends when you were at that New Year's Eve party. Oh yeah, and if you happen to be a terrorist and you took a photo with some of your buddies while prepping for a raid, the agency definitely wants to know where you took that picture — and it's looking for ideas to help figure it out. In an announcement for its new "Finder" program, the agency says that it is looking for ways to geolocate (a fancy word for "locate" that implies having coordinates for a place) images by extracting data from the images themselves and using this to make guesses about where they were taken. ... And you better believe that it's not just spooks who want to know where images were taken. Google, Facebook, Apple and all the other internet and social media giants are probably looking to do the same thing so that they can better understand where their users are and what they are doing there. So before long your Facebook or Google+ account will be automatically tagging who is in your pictures and where they were taken… …and spooks might be, too.

Rush Limbaugh: The Republican leadership is operating out of fear. I want you to think, to transfer that to your personal life, and I want to ask you to consider: Whenever you do anything out of fear, how does it turn out? Doing anything from the perspective of fear is disastrous, or potentially so. And that has been the position of the Republican leadership and the inside-the-Beltway so-called conservative media. Fear. Fear of being blamed, primarily. But fear of other things. The age-old fears, the fears rooted in the mentality of being consistent, constant losers. ... Winners do not compromise. Winners do not compromise with themselves. The winners who do compromise are winners who still don't believe in themselves as winners, who still think of themselves as losers. And you and I are finished with supporting people who think of themselves as losers, or in the minority, or we don't have the power, or we don't control all three branches, or what have you. ... The Tea Party is putting country before party. They can't be bought off with committee assignments or with campaign re-election funds. They can't be bought, and Washington can't understand this.

Two rounds of QE have now been completed and, as a result, the Fed owns approximately $1.7 Trillion of US Treasuries or around 12% of the US debt. In fact, the amount held by the Fed far exceeds that held by China, Japan or any other foreign government. ... So, what if the Fed... unilaterally decided to cancel those debts? ...wipe all or part of the $1.7T US obligation from their books and notify the US Treasury that they are canceling the debt? ... The US would then be seen as just another banana republic, able to do whatever it wanted in the fiscal monetary arena. This view would place us on the same paths taken by Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe and innumerable other countries who deliberately destroyed their currencies.