Free Republic

The man who spoke for Comcast at Harvard last month has told the Federal Communications Commission that the agency has no legal power to stop the cable giant from engaging in what it calls "network management practices" (critics call it peer-to-peer traffic blocking). Comcast vice president David L. Cohen's latest filing with the Commission claims that regulators can do nothing even if they conclude that Comcast's behavior runs afoul of the FCC's Internet neutrality guidelines. "The congressional policy and agency practice of relying on the marketplace instead of regulation to maximize consumer welfare has been proven by experience (including the...

WASHINGTON - House Democratic leaders agreed Thursday to a rare closed-door session — the first in 25 years — to debate surveillance legislation. Republicans requested privacy for what they termed "an honest debate" on the new Democratic eavesdropping bill that is opposed by the White House and most Republicans in Congress. The closed-door debate was scheduled for late Thursday night, after the House chamber could be cleared and swept by security personnel to make sure there are no listening devices. The last private session in the House was in 1983 on U.S. support for paramilitary operations in Nicaragua. Only five...

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee hinted Sunday that a battle over an expired eavesdropping law might be moving toward a conclusion that gave phone companies the retroactive legal protections long sought by President Bush. The chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, said in an interview on CNN that the committee had been talking to the companies “because if we’re going to give them blanket immunity, we want to know and understand what it is we’re giving immunity for.”Mr. Reyes did not specify what provisions a House bill might contain. But his use of the words...

CFIF today voiced its opposition to the recently released "Net Neutrality" bill sponsored by Representatives Ed Markey and Chip Pickering. "If enacted, the dubiously-titled "Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008" would undo many of the framework policies that have fostered growth and innovation in telecommunications services in recent years," said CFIF President Jeffery Mazzella. "This legislation won't preserve Internet freedom. Rather, it will cripple a free and open market that continues to encourage unprecedented innovation and benefits consumers." "This legislation is nothing more than the heavy hand of government dictating the terms of service for the Internet," Mazzella continued.

A rare new species of plant that eats small rats has been discovered at the tip of Cape York. Pitcher plants, otherwise known as flesh-eating plants, grow throughout Cape York but now a new, larger species that grows like a vine has been discovered. The new species has been called "Tenax".

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's demand for immunity for telephone companies that participated in his warrantless domestic spying program won an initial victory on Monday in the U.S. Senate. On a vote of 76-10, far more than the 60 needed, the Democratic-led Senate cleared a procedural hurdle and began considering a bill to increase congressional and judicial oversight of electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists. It includes a provision to grant retroactive immunity to any telecommunications company that took part in Bush's spying program -- surveillance without court warrants of e-mails and telephone calls of people in the United...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Increasingly worried over Internet providers' behavior, a nonprofit has released software that helps determine whether online glitches are innocent hiccups or evidence of deliberate traffic tampering. The San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes the program, released Wednesday, will help uncover "data discrimination" - efforts by Internet providers to disrupt some uses of their services - in addition to the cases reported separately by EFF, The Associated Press and other sources. "People have all sorts of problems, and they don't know whether to attribute that to some sort of misconfiguration, or deliberate behavior...

A federal appeals court in San Francisco today handed a major victory to the Bush administration, ruling that a lawsuit challenging the government's warrantless wiretapping program could not go forward because of the "state secrets" privilege. In a 3-0 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the government, which had argued that allowing an Islamic charity's claims that it was illegally spied upon to go forward would threaten national security. In the opinion, Judge M. Margaret McKeown flatly rejected the government's argument that "the very subject matter of the litigation is a state secret." However, after reviewing...

Even as Governor Deval Patrick seeks to license three resort casinos in Massachusetts, he hopes to clamp down on the explosion in Internet gambling by making it illegal for state residents to place a bet on line. He has proposed jail terms of up to two years and $25,000 fines for violators. The provision, buried deep in Patrick's bill to allow three casinos to the state, puts the governor at odds with a fellow Democrat: US Representative Barney Frank, the sponsor of federal legislation to license and regulate online gambling nationally. Yesterday Frank strongly criticized the governor's plan to punish...

Editor's note: Rocky Spencer had one of the most unusual job titles in all of state government: carnivore specialist. Spencer and his main co-worker, a dog named Mishka, searched the forests of East King County for evidence of cougars that roam in and around the suburbs there. He and Brian Kertson, a University of Washington doctoral student, had been conducting the most in-depth study ever on the cougars that live alongside the state's largest concentration of humans. Spencer, 55, was killed Saturday while working on a project to relocate bighorn sheep from the Yakima River canyon. He accidentally walked into...

AT&T is getting together with Hollywood studios and recording companies to develop technology to snoop on your Internet traffic in search of pirated material, according to a story posted today by the LA Times. You'll need to register for free with the Times site to read the original story. At a time when Apple, EMI and other companies are making the no-brainer, money-making decision to sell music without cumbersome and annoying digital-rights management, AT&T has decided to go the "Privacy? What privacy?" route. This should flat out be illegal. To me, it's akin to AT&T deciding they're going to wiretap...

Source: Queen's University Belfast Date: April 22, 2007 One Small Carnivore Survived The Last Ice Age In Ireland Science Daily — You may well ask the question, where did the animals and plants of modern day Ireland and Britain come from? Published in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society, scientists at Queen’s University Belfast have uncovered evidence that stoats survived in Ireland at the coldest point of the last Ice Age, 23,500 years ago. The research has revealed that despite few animals or plants surviving the millennia of freezing cold and ice, the Irish stoats had real staying power....

After telling you yesterday that all this stuff about NSA phone number farming is OLD news and in fact TWELEVE Years old, and the fact that Mr. Hagel is full of crap when he feigns ignorance and outrage (He can forget the Presidential race in 2008 - he's already anathema to the Right). But a fact of that previous post needs repeating over and over again because it's the only way the truth will get told. Democrats that are complaining about NSA phone number farming have no one to bitch to but themselves. Now some of the media are bringing...

The USA Today "scoop" on the NSA's massive telephone surveillance program isn't really news at all - though liberal media outlets have been blaring the story as a shocking revelation all Thursday morning. The Agency, the paper announced ominously, "has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans . . . The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime." But as NewsMax noted in December - back when the New York Times tried to...

DOJ Will Assert Military and State Secrets Privilege and Request Dismissal of Lawsuit San Francisco - The United States government filed a "Statement of Interest" Friday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) class-action lawsuit against AT&T, announcing that the government would "assert the military and state secrets privilege" and "intervene to seek dismissal" of the case. EFF's lawsuit accuses AT&T of collaborating with the National Security Agency in its massive surveillance program. EFF's evidence regarding AT&T's dragnet surveillance of its networks, currently filed under seal, includes a declaration by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician, and several internal AT&T...

Yes i know this will probably be zotted within 2 minutes of posting, but freepers watch out.. The admins monitor your PM's. The absolutely most disgusting abuse of power i've ever seen.. Now i know there are 400 of you morons ready to hit me with your ZOT pictures, go for it.. it just proves how pathetic you are. Keep on blaming the Clinton administration for this president's mistakes, keep making excuses.. You are comic relief. See you on DU :)) (and watch what you say in your PM's, they are under heavy watch) later ho's.

The explosive idea of forcing Internet providers to record their customers' online activities for future police access is gaining ground in state capitols and in Washington, D.C.... Mandatory data retention requirements worry privacy advocates because they permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity that normally would have been discarded after a few months. And some proposals would require providers to retain data that ordinarily never would have been kept at all.... Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the free-market Cato Institute, was the member of the Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials. The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said....

NEW YORK - The National Security Agency has conducted much broader surveillance of e-mails and phone calls — without court orders — than the Bush administration has acknowledged, The New York Times reported on its Web site. The NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained access to streams of domestic and international communications, said the Times in the report late Friday, citing unidentified current and former government officials.

WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency, in carrying out President Bush's order to intercept the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of links to Al Qaeda, has probably been using computers to monitor all other Americans' international communications as well, according to specialists familiar with the workings of the NSA. The Bush administration and the NSA have declined to provide details about the program the president authorized in 2001, but specialists said the agency serves as a vast data collection and sorting operation. It captures reams of data from satellites, fiberoptic lines, and Internet switching stations, and then...