Free Republic

Four days after Judge Schnider unsealed the custody records, Ryan dropped out of the race for the horror of (allegedly) propositioning his own wife and then taking “no” for an answer. Alan Keyes stepped in as a last-minute Republican candidate. And that’s how Obama became a U.S. senator. He destroyed both his Democratic primary opponent and his Republican general election opponent with salacious allegations about their personal lives taken from “sealed” court records. Obama’s team delved into Sarah Palin’s marriage and spread rumors of John McCain’s alleged affair in 2008 and they smeared Herman Cain in 2011 with hazy sexual...

I have a facebook account under a silly name that I use to log into other sites to make political comments. Today facebook has demanded that I upload a photo ID from a state-issued driver's license, passport, military ID card, etc. before I can log in again. I have screen shots of the demands that I will upload to this thread when I get home. It may be time to go dark on the Interwebs. My spidey sense is tingling.

Image Source: yournewswire.com A new Senate bill would let the FBI and other law enforcement agencies access the contents of any US citizen’s email without a court order during investigations. Instead, the FBI would need just a National Security Letter, which would force companies to provide email access to the agency without alerting the person who’s being investigated. The FBI can already access phone records without a court order, but that law doesn’t apply to email conversations. The Senate Intelligence Committee approved the 2017 Intelligence Authorization Act on Tuesday, CNET reports. The bill will head to the full Senate now that...

Starting today, Windows Insiders will get access to a new commitment option in Cortana for Windows 10. Commitments is very similar to the existing flight and delivery tracking in Cortana, but it's designed to pick up on emails where you promise your boss to finish a particular project in time. "Cortana will look for emails where you've said you're going to do something," explains Microsoft's Marcus Ash in an interview with The Verge. If you send an email to a friend or colleague with content like "I'll get back to you by next week" or "I'll have this finished by...

The White House announced Friday afternoon that it is launching an inter-agency task force to counter the sharp growth in violent extremism in America, according to an announcement. As senior members of the Obama administration's national security team meet with technology leaders in Silicon Valley, the White House’s National Security Council announced that the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security would team up to launch a Countering Violent Extremism Task Force, according to the announcement. The White House background document accompanying the announcement does contain any specific reference to the types of "violent extremism" the administration seeks to counter. The...

Microsoft will warn email and OneDrive users if it detects apparent attempts by governments to hack into their accounts. The rollout of the alert system on Wednesday follows reports Redmond had failed to warn Hotmail users targeted by Chinese hackers, according to former employees. Reuters reports Microsoft was hacked in 2011 but failed to notify affected users, partly to avoid antagonising China, the suspected culprit. Targeted users were instead advised to pick new passwords without any particular reason being supplied at the time. Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo already offer similar government hacker alert systems to the one just introduced...

The Secret Service leaked sensitive personal information to the press about Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz as the Utah Republican was investigating the beleaguered agency, an inspector general's report said Wednesday. The Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General issued a report on Wednesday that accused Secret Service Assistant Director Edward Lowery and other agency officials of plotting to leak information about Chaffetz, including his unsuccessful attempt to join the organization. The leaks were a highly unusual breach of decorum. Lawmakers often battle with agencies, but the fights mostly stay above board and focus on...

Thursday on Fox News Radio’s “John Gibson Show,” investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explained she is suing the Department of Justice to get discovery, which she said hopefully will start with the names of the agents or third-party contractors sometimes hired for “certain dark projects,” who hacked her computer and planted a fiber optics cable at her house.

For years Americans' right to privacy, as granted by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, has come under threat as the country's surveillance systems have grown. After intelligence leaks by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, however, the NSA's domestic dragnet is finally getting the attention that many people feel it deserves.

MADISON, Wis. – Democrat Milwaukee County prosecutors tapped the email and text communications of conservative activists as part of a five-year probe aimed at bringing down Republican Gov. Scott Walker, affidavits reviewed by Wisconsin Watchdog reveal. One target of the spying operation told Wisconsin Watchdog the methods used to keep tabs on Wisconsin residents were like those of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program. “It was actually worse because (Milwaukee County prosecutors) were taking the body of emails and looking at actual data,” said the source, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution from the prosecutors....

President Obama liked the idea laid out in a memo from his staff: an ambitious plan to expand high-speed Internet access in schools that would allow students to use digital notebooks and teachers to customize lessons like never before. Better yet, the president would not need Congress to approve it. White House senior advisers have described the little-known proposal, announced earlier this summer under the name ConnectEd, as one of the biggest potential achievements of Obama’s second term. There’s just one little catch — the proposal costs billions of dollars, and Obama wants to pay for it by raising fees...

We at Walking In The Desert would like to let our readers know about a documentary that a friend and I are working on. This is our first documentary but we hope that this documentary will be a success and will promote the usage of the Tridentine Mass (Extraordinary Form) A friend and I are in the process to create a documentary that will promote the usage of the Latin Mass. We want to be able to do a video documentary that will interview priests and lay people who attend or celebrate the Latin Mass. We want to ask them...

The Washington Post’s privacy story on Apple and how they got it wrong Posted on Monday, October 20th, 2014 at 6:36 pm. PT Written by Jim Dalrymple The Washington Post ran a sensationalistic story this morning that claimed Apple would have user’s location, unique identifying codes and search terms when using Spotlight in OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. The function is part of Spotlight search, which was updated with last week’s launch of new Mac computers and Apple’s latest operating system, Yosemite OS X, which also is available for download to owners of older machines. Once Yosemite is...

The six-strikes Copyright Alert System has been active for one and a half years now and warnings are being sent out at an increasing rate. The program will double in size this year, according to its executive director, in the hope that it will eventually change people's norms toward piracy. February last year, five U.S. Internet providers started sending Copyright Alerts to customers who use BitTorrent to pirate movies, TV-shows and music.These efforts are part of the Copyright Alert System, an anti-piracy plan that aims to educate the public. Through a series of warnings suspected pirates are informed that their...

Facebook said Thursday that future research on its 1.3 billion users would be subjected to greater internal scrutiny from top managers, especially if they focused on “deeply personal topics” or specific groups of people. But no outside body will review Facebook’s research projects, and the company declined to disclose what guidelines it would use to decide whether research was appropriate. Nor did it indicate whether it will get consent from users for projects like its emotion manipulation study, which set off a global furor when it was disclosed this summer. In essence, Facebook’s message is the same as it has...

The Seattle City Council passed a new ordinance Monday that could mean $1 fines for people who toss too many table scraps into the trash. Under current Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) rules, people living in single-family homes are encouraged but not required to dispose of food waste and compostable paper products in compost bins. Apartment buildings must have compost bins available, but residents of apartment buildings aren’t required to use them. And businesses aren’t subject to any composting requirements. Under the new rules, collectors can take a cursory look each time they dump trash into a garbage truck. If they...

Via the Lars Larson Radio Show, yesterday: The federal government spent $1 million to create a database to track hate speech and “misinformation” on Twitter. The National Science Foundation is behind the creation of the online government monitoring project. The database will reportedly include searches for “suspicious memes,” “false and misleading ideas” and will place particular focus on online political activity.

The U.S. Department of Justice wants new authority to hack and search remote computers during investigations, saying the new rules are needed because of complex criminal schemes sometimes using millions of machines spread across the country. Digital rights groups say the request from the DOJ for authority to search computers outside the district where an investigation is based raises concerns about Internet security and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. “By expanding federal law enforcement’s power to secretly exploit ‘zero-day’ vulnerabilities in software and Internet platforms, the proposal threatens to weaken Internet security for all of us,” Nathan...

Federal systems remained vulnerable to hackers even after researchers identified the bug. Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn't alert anyone in the government. Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed"—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7. The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going...

WASHINGTON — Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday. But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to...