Filed under: 1984, 2-party system, 4th amendment, Barack Obama, Big Brother, bush = obama, civil liberties, civil rights, DOJ, FBI, George Bush, government crimes, left right paradigm, nanny state, obama, obama = bush, obama deception, orwell, Police State, search warrant, Surveillance, warrantless search, warrantless wiretap | Tags: obama fraud, obama lie
The Obama DOJ’s warrantless demands for e-mails
Salon
April 15, 2010
 I want your emails. |
A very significant case involving core privacy protections is now being litigated, where the Obama Justice Department is seeking to obtain from Yahoo “all emails” sent and received by multiple Yahoo email accounts, despite the fact that DOJ has never sought, let alone obtained, a search warrant, and despite there being no notice of any kind to the email account holders:
- In a brief filed Tuesday afternoon, the coalition says a search warrant signed by a judge is necessary before the FBI or other police agencies can read the contents of Yahoo Mail messages — a position that puts those companies directly at odds with the Obama administration.
As part of a case conducted largely under seal and thus hidden from public view, the DOJ demanded these emails from Yahoo without any effort to demonstrate probable cause to believe the email user was involved in the commission of any crime, but instead merely based on the vague claim that there is “reasonable grounds to believe” the emails “are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” If the DOJ position were accepted, Americans would have substantially less privacy protections in their email communications.
Federal law is crystal clear that a search warrant is required for the Government to obtain any emails that have been stored less than 180 days — one that requires a showing of probable cause and that the documents sought to be described with particularlity. In contrast to the nation’s largest telecoms’ eager cooperation with Bush’s illegal surveillance programs, Yahoo — to its credit — refused to turn over any such emails to the Government without a search warrant. As a result, the DOJ is now seeking a federal court Order compelling the company to comply with its demands, and a coalition of privacy groups and technology companies — led by EFF and including Google — have now filed a brief supporting Yahoo’s position. Both Yahoo and that coalition insist that federal law as well as the Fourth Amendment’s search and seizure protection bar the Obama DOJ from acquiring these emails without a search warrant.
Obama will bypass Congress to detain suspects indefinitely
Obama Supports Renewing The PATRIOT ACT
Joe Biden’s pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record
Obama Votes YES on FISA Spy-Bill, McCain Skips
Obama Supports Giving Telecoms Amnesty for Illegal Wiretaps
Obama Implements ‘Precrime’ ‘Prolonged Detention’ for Detainees
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, Dictatorship, Empire, human rights, IBM, orwell, Police State, precrime, predictive analytics, prison industrial complex, slavery, u.s. constitution
Crime Prediction Software Is Here and It’s a Very Bad Idea
GIZMODO
April 14, 2010
There are no naked pre-cogs inside glowing jacuzzis yet, but the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents, putting potential offenders under specific prevention and education programs. Goodbye, human rights!
They will use this software on juvenile delinquents, using a series of variables to determine the potential for these people to commit another crime. Depending on this probability, they will put them under specific re-education programs. Deepak Advani—vice president of predictive analytics at IBM—says the system gives “reliable projections” so governments can take “action in real time” to “prevent criminal activities?”
Really? “Reliable projections”? “Action in real time”? “Preventing criminal activities”? I don’t know about how reliable your system is, IBM, but have you ever heard of the 5th, the 6th, and the 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution? What about article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? No? Let’s make this easy then: Didn’t you watch that scientology nutcase in Minority Report?
Sure. Some will argue that these juvenile delinquents were already convicted for other crimes, so hey, there’s no harm. This software will help prevent further crimes. It will make all of us safer? But would it? Where’s the guarantee of that? Why does the state have to assume that criminal behavior is a given? And why should the government decide who goes to an specific prevention program or who doesn’t based on what a computer says? The fact is that, even if the software was 99.99% accurate, there will be always an innocent person who will be fucked. And that is exactly why we have something called due process and the presumption of innocence. That’s why those things are not only in the United States Constitution, but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights too.
Other people will say that government officials already makes these decisions based on reports and their own judgement. True. It seems that a computer program may be fairer than a human, right? Maybe. But at the end the interpretation of the data is always in the hands of humans (and the program itself is written by humans).
But what really worries me is that this is a first big step towards something larger and darker. Actually, it’s the second: IBM says that the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom—which has an impeccable record on not pre-judging its citizens—already uses this system to prevent criminal activities. Actually, it may be the third big step, because there’s already software in place to blacklist people as potential terrorist, although most probably not as sophisticated as this.
IBM clearly wants this to go big. They have spent a whooping $12 billion beefing up its analytics division. Again, here’s the full quote from Deepak Advani:
- Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide a highly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities by identifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities. It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth of data available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens.
If that sounds scary to you, that’s because it is. First it’s the convicted-but-potentially-recidivistic criminals. Then it’s the potential terrorists. Then it’s everyone of us, in a big database, getting flagged because some combination of factors—travel patterns, credit card activity, relationships, messaging, social activity and everything else—indicate that we may be thinking about doing something against the law. Potentially, a crime prediction system can avoid murder, robbery, or a terrorist act.
It actually sounds like a good idea. For example, there are certain patterns that can identify psychopaths and potential killers or child abusers or wife beaters. It only makes sense to put a future system in place that can prevent identify potential criminals, then put them under surveillance.
The reality is that it’s not such a good idea: While everything may seem driven by the desire to achieve better security, one single false positive would make the whole system unfair. And that’s not even getting into the potential abuse of such a system. Like the last time IBM got into a vaguely similar business for a good cause, during the 1930s. They shipped a lot of cataloguing machines to certain government in Europe, to put together an advanced census. That was good. Census can improve societies by identifying needs and problems that the government can solve. At the end, however, that didn’t end well for more than 11 million people.
And yes, this comparison is an extreme exaggeration. But one thing is clear: No matter how you look at it, cataloguing people—any kind of people—based on statistical predictive software, and then taking pre-empetive actions against them based on the results, is the wrong way to improve our society. Agreeing with this course of action will inevitably take us into a potentially fatal path. [Yahoo!]
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, DHS, Homeland Security, nanny state, orwell, Police State, War On Terror
Homeland Security to Develop Cell Phones That ‘Smell’ Poisonous Gas
Switched
April 14, 2010
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to make us into walking poison detectors. According to Physorg, as part of a program called Cell-All, the department will develop by the end of the year 40 cell phone prototypes that can detect poisonous gas in the air. Officials say cell phones available today can be modified to do this by simply inserting a chip that costs less than $1. When the chip detects a harmful toxin in the air, it alerts the owner by vibrating or making a noise. If the threat is serious enough, the phone will send a message with its findings to a central server. Then, that server will check phones near that location to make sure the findings aren’t in error. After determining the danger, authorities would be notified and possibly deployed.
Homeland Security claims the service will be used on a volunteer basis, and that all information will remain anonymous and confidential. Still, we expect more questions about privacy to come up as details become available, especially since it sounds like this service will essentially track your cell phone’s location. But Cell-All could save the government time, money and manpower when it comes to responding to toxic gas threats.
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, big pharma, Dictatorship, Empire, medical industrial complex, nanny state, orwell, thought crime, thought criminal | Tags: American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM
Psychiatrists say that being angry is a mental illness
Ethan A. Huff
Natural News
April 7, 2010
Proposed updates to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) are prompting many to question whether or not the psychiatric profession itself has gone crazy. The latest additions to the alleged “mentally ill” could include hoarders, people who get angry every now and again, lazy people, and even those who get outraged over things like sex and violence on television.
Since its first publication back in 1952, the DSM has grown exponentially larger with each subsequent edition. Many people are lambasting the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for trying to establish virtually all behavior as some sort of mental disorder that should be treated with psychiatric drugs.
“For this latest revision they’ve set up a special task force to decide if behaviors like bitterness, extreme shopping or overuse of the internet should be included,” explained Professor Christopher Lane to a reporter from the the U.K.’s Daily Mail. “The science underlying all this is very shaky to non-existent.”
Dr. David Kupfer, chairman of the APA’s special task force, has come out in defense of the additions. He claims that each one is grounded in science, despite the fact that no biological markers can definitely identify any of the additions as actual disorders. In order to identify things like excessive shopping and extreme laziness as mental disorders, the team will simply call them as such and provide a description of the each one’s symptoms.
If the additions themselves are not loony enough, the APA is actually recommending the inclusion of what it calls “risk syndromes”, or early warning signs that could lead to one of its supposed mental disorders. By catching these “risk syndromes” early, doctors can begin prescribing medication for conditions that people do not even have.
The entire DSM charade is a ploy to characterize an ever-increasing segment of the population as being “sick” and in need of pharmaceutical drugs. There can be no variations in personality and individual characteristics; if a person does not live, think, and react in prescribed fashion, then he or she is sick and in need of treatment, according to the APA.
The latest DSM draft, which is set to be published in 2013, has already been posted on the internet for public viewing. Since being posted, there has been widespread outcry against many of the proposed additions. It remains to be seen what will be included in the final edition and whether or not people will continue to take the DSM and the APA seriously.
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, bilderberg, biometrics, Control Grid, Dictatorship, Empire, Fascism, Health Care Bill, health care reform, human rights, medical industrial complex, microchip, nanny state, New World Order, NWO, obama deception, obamacare, orwell, Police State, PositiveID, Real ID, RFID, slavery, Verichip
Microchipping Americans Found in Health Care Bill
Daily Paul
August 30, 2009
“Buried deep within the over 1,000 pages of the massive US Health Care Bill (PDF) in a “non-discussed” section titled: Subtitle C-11 Sec. 2521— National Medical Device Registry, and which states its purpose as:
“The Secretary shall establish a national medical device registry (in this subsection referred to as the ‘registry’) to facilitate analysis of postmarket safety and outcomes data on each device that—‘‘(A) is or has been used in or on a patient; and ‘‘(B) is a class III device; or ‘‘(ii) a class II device that is implantable.”
In “real world speak”, according to this report, this new law, when fully implemented, provides the framework for making the United States the first Nation in the World to require each and every one of its citizens to have implanted in them a radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchip for the purpose of controlling who is, or isn’t, allowed medical care in their country.
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/111/AAHCA09001xml.pdf
Filed under: 1984, civil disobedience, civil liberties, civil rights, civil unrest, Dictatorship, Dissent, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, drone, Empire, Fascism, LRAD, Martial Law, militarized police, Military Industrial Complex, Nazi, New World Order, non compliance, NWO, Police State, political dissent, Protest, psychological warfare, Psyops, slavery, uav, urban warfare, War On Terror
Militarized Police State: LRAD on a UAV
Surveillance Drones To Zap Protesters Into Submission
