Free Republic

Following Rep. Keith Ellison [Muslim Congressman], Rev. Al Sharpton, Rachel Maddow MSNBC, Gavin Newsom, [and others]

SNIPPET: "ONTARIO, Calif. -- State lawmakers are holding a hearing today in Ontario to discuss the rise in the number of criminal gangs using networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Officials say the hearing entitled "Gangs 2.0: The Emerging Threat of Cyberthugs" will explore the use of social networking tools in gang recruitment and gang-related crime. Assembly majority leader Alberto Torrico, and attorney general candidate, says gang members both in and out of prison are making more use of technology."

BOSTON - A pharmacy college graduate conspired with two other men on a terror plot to kill two prominent U.S. politicians and carry out a holy war by attacking shoppers in U.S. malls and American troops in Iraq, prosecutors said Wednesday. But their plans — in which the men used code words like "peanut butter and jelly" for fighting in Somalia and "culinary school" for terrorist camps — were thwarted in part when they could not find training and were unable to buy automatic weapons, authorities said. Tarek Mehanna worked with the men from 2001 to May 2008 on the...

A predator on the Sex Offenders' Register killed a 17-year-old girl he met and groomed on Facebook after luring her to a secret meeting. The 32-year-old posed as a 16-year-old boy to befriend Ashleigh Hall on the social networking site. But within hours of their first meeting, the teenager was dead...

With painful honesty, Katie Piper, the former TV presenter tells why she has finally waived her right to anonymity – and reveals the awful events that changed her life for ever However much she would like to forget them, the details of how she lost her dreams, her identity and very nearly her life will stay with Katie Piper for ever. They are burned into both her memory and her face. Katie, 26, has remained fearful and anonymous in the 18 months since the man she met on the internet attempted to destroy her, so few will recognise her name....

"The powerful online voice of jihad Shadowy cleric revered by disenchanted Muslim youths throughout West cited in Toronto 18 case" CAPTION: "A Facebook page for Anwar al Awlaki has 4,800 fans. He has been cited as an inspiration for extremist plots." FACEBOOK SNIPPET: "In a snowy field near Barrie, a group of young Muslim men listened intently to the eloquent voice emanating from the laptop. Anwar al Awlaki preached in perfect Arabic and flawless English about the need to fight in the name of religion, because the "world is united in fighting Islam." The time for jihad is now, no...

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH, 2009 AT 6:09 PM Catching Up With DoD Posted by Molly Fedick Roxie Merritt, Director of Community Relations and Public Liaison at the Department of Defense, reports back from the Alliance of Youth Movements. She is down there with four members of her team, where she's been meeting with leaders from all over the world, all of whom have found success employing social networking tools in their businesses and organizations. Taking a break from the Mexico sunshine (the conference is in Mexico City), she...

I am thinking of getting a facebook page. Some friends, and I, wish to start a joint blog to promote our group. Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing? All the facebook users that I know, just use the page to find old friends. But I want to use it for business purposes. I would appreciate you sharing some of your knowledge

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1ST, 2009 AT 1:59 PM New Media Roundup From Across the Administration Posted by Katie Stanton Over the past few weeks, our colleagues from across the Administration have been busy leveraging social media tools to help make government more open and transparent. Here's a quick roundup of new ways to connect and get the latest updates from across the Administration: Today, the Department of Justice announced the launch of the new Justice.gov and new profiles on Twitter, YouTube , MySpace and Facebook. Yesterday, Secretary Salazar...

Recently declassified documents obtained by Wired magazine reveal a massive Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data mining operation. It already possesses over 1.5 billion records from government and private-sector sources. That figure is expected by the FBI to balloon to over 6 billion within a few years. And it is not just terrorists they are after.  According to the documents, the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is being used to pursue multiple types of non-terrorism domestic investigations. It is also meant to be able to sort through the data — everything from health and travel records to credit card...

Hey, physicians-in-training: Blabbing about patient care on Facebook and Twitter are Doctor No-Nos. A new survey of medical-school deans reveals that med students' unprofessional conduct on social networking sites and blogs is common, according to Time magazine. Many of the future doctors use YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook to discuss sexual misconduct, post discriminatory statements and talk about patient cases, according to the survey, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It's ongoing even though the students understand patient-confidentiality laws and have been instructed in the ethical standards of their chosen profession, according to the article...

Erik Telford remembers all too vividly the dark cloud hanging over him on 5 November 2008, the day after Barack Obama was elected president. For the internet strategist at the rightwing campaign group Americans for Prosperity, election night was a double disaster. Not only had Obama won the votes, he had outwitted his Republican opponents in his use of new media tricks such as email recruiting and social networking. "The left was far ahead of us. The efforts that Obama put into internet campaigning and what he accomplished were extraordinary," Telford says. That cloud hung over the conservative movement for...

Note: Photo included. Contrite St. John's Univ. student behind alleged massacre threats on Facebook says booze to blame BY KERRY BURKE DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Thursday, September 17th 2009, 3:34 PM PHOTO CAPTION: "Radames Santiago Jr., 18, a student from St John's, who was arrested for making threats on his Facebook page." SNIPPET: "A St. John's University freshman who posted messages on Facebook threatening to launch a "Virginia Tech attack" at the Queens campus told the Daily News that he was just drunk and never would have caused anyone harm." SNIPPET: "Santiago, who lives in Washington Heights with his mom...

From New York, London to Israel Integrating SEO, PR Creates Potent Marketing By Joel Leyden Israel News Agency Tel Aviv, Israel ---- September 9, 2009 ..... Once upon a time, when you wanted your business products and or services to be known one would either hire an advertising or PR agency. Having full color print display ads appearing in general and trade magazines and editorial stories placed about your services was the only route. The ad agency would send out an insertion order and the public relations agency in New York, London or Israel would fax news releases. Yes, there...

I work in the IT field and was doing some SEO work this morning - ran across this article on one of the tech blogs. It's concerning the Obama WH collecting data from sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and other Social networking sites.

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites.The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation # WHO-S-09-0003,...

Obama czar's comments surface amid report White House to gather Web users' infoEnvironmental activism combined with new information technology, such as social networking websites, can bring about a political realignment "to get us the country we always wanted," according to President Obama's controversial "green jobs" adviser, Van Jones. "It's my great hope that if we combine this breakthrough in clean energy technology with the real breakthrough in the information networking domain, we can get to a breakthrough in American politics," said Jones at a speech screened by WND. Jones was speaking on how social technology can help solve global problems...

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one. – Friedrich Nietzsche For those of us who work in a corporate environment, it is very clear that we either follow corporate policies or lose our job. At my workplace for example, we are not allowed to display any sort of religious material in or outside our offices. We are also forced to accept our company’s policies in regards to environmentalism or alternative lifestyles. Company policies are not created from the consensus or vote by the employees. Many companies have and are engaged in...

President Obama's White House does not exactly have a stellar record when it comes to personal information and the Internet. In less than one month, the president's new media team has come under fire for asking citizens to report "fishy e-mails" about Obama's health care reform plan and for e-mail messages from David Axelrod that somehow went to people who did not sign up for them.So when the Executive Office of the President seeks a contractor to archive the usernames and possibly other data from social network users, it is certainly worth asking them why. We did. We have not...

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites. The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.” In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation...

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word. The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting...

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites. The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation #...

26 August 2009 INDONESIAN BOMBING SUSPECT A JIHAD MAGAZINE PUBLISHER AND WEBMASTER As of today he's in the custody of Detachment 88. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. First the news reports: • Preacher's son arrested: Mohammad Jibril runs his father's company, Ar-rahmah Media, which publishes religious books and JihadMagz, a glossy 148-page magazine devoted to Islamic fighters and wars across the world. He also set up the militant website, arrahmah.com, which posts news in Bahasa Indonesia and English on the Islamic struggle to preserve and spread their religion.

There's a certain irony here. The 20th-century community organizer who used 21st-century tools for his people-powered White House campaign now finds himself besieged by citizens airing their grievances at 19th-century-inspired town-hall-style meetings. Barack Obama's top legislative goal hangs in the balance and his popularity is suffering as critics co-opt his tech-savvy organizing methods, tag him as a boogeyman and disrupt local gatherings on his proposed health care overhaul. Is the groundbreaking campaigner, whose White House political arm is aptly called Organizing for America, being outmaneuvered? "That's a fair summary of where things are at the moment," said Sanford Horwitt, a...

And other social networking sites as the Pentagon weighed a similar prohibition over cybersecurity concerns. The Marines had already banned the use of social media on military networks but issued a more detailed order this week defining which sites were out of bounds and noting possible exceptions to the rule, a Marine Corps spokesman, Lieutenant Craig Thomas said. "These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries," the Marine Corps said in an order posted on its website. "The...

SNIPPET: "UPDATE: The Koobface gang is upgrading the command and control infrastructure in response to the positive ROI out of the takedown activities." SNIPPET: "Related posts: Dissecting Koobface Worm's Twitter Campaign Dissecting the Koobface Worm's December Campaign Dissecting the Latest Koobface Facebook Campaign The Koobface Gang Mixing Social Engineering Vectors"

Speaking at this week’s Personal Democracy Forum in New York, boyd said that even among people with access to the Net, long-held social divisions of race, class, and income are starting to play out online, particularly among teens now starting to choose which social network they prefer, MySpace or Facebook. “Social media don’t eradicate social divisions,” says boyd, an expert in NextGen behaviors for Microsoft and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “[Social media are] making the old social divisions obvious in totally new ways.”

Applying for a job with the City of Bozeman? You may be asked to provide more personal information than you expected. That was the case for one person who applied for employment with the City. The anonymous viewer emailed the news station recently to express concern with a component of the city's background check policy, which states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate. The requirement is included on a waiver statement applicants must sign, giving the City permission to conduct an investigation into the...

I just discovered FreeRepublic's Twitter page @FreeRepublic and I want to say kudos to whoever put it together. If you aren't following, click on the link above to join.

(United States Army) This week the Army not only launched an official blog portal, but also an Army fan page on Facebook.

LONDON: Fresh research has confirmed what many parents and teachers already feared: social networking sites are damaging students’ academic performance. The researchers discovered that the majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site. In order to reach their conclusion, researchers discovered how students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and “poking” others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work. “Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying,” the...

The Conservative Underground is the social networking site for conservatives.Please join and invite others.

In these tough economic times, more people are turning to online resources for networking, job hunting, support and even faith to support their road to recovery. As more bad news is piled on top of bad, the Web has become a lifeline for job seekers, who are reconnecting with classmates and former co-workers in an effort to find that next position. Sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook are reporting huge spikes in traffic as people try to reconnect with others for job leads, references and more. (Many people have accepted LinkedIn has a bona fide business tool but have dismissed...

Hearst Newspapers will roll out the "social publishing platform" of Helium, a sort of giant freelance marketplace for hyperlocal content, Andover, Mass.-based Helium said Wednesday. Helium provides a place where local writers can contribute articles on a wide variety of topics. The articles are rated by other writers for quality control, and writers are paid, usually for about $20 to $50 for each piece. Hearst will use Helium's freelance Marketplace to identify a stable of community stringers, who are compensated for contributing articles on a variety of topics. Hearst will also launch Helium's community debate that allows readers to post...

By Judy Shapiro United States News Agency New York --- February 18, 2009...... I find myself in an usual business at a very unusual time. After spending years working with technology leaders in telecommunications, software and security, I wanted to explore the expanding role of social networks in our everyday online worlds. So I went looking for opportunities in this new “cool” space. Not so easy given my decidedly lack of “coolness” (I haven’t seen “20 something” in a few decades). Yet nonetheless, in a sheer stroke of great luck and timing, I recently landed at Paltalk — the leader...

The bubble in social networking has burst, decisively. LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees — and offered them no severance, we're told. The quirky site, part blog and part social network, is best known for its users' weird obsessions — like the troublesome clique of Harry Potter erotica writers, whose outré tastes ran afoul of LiveJournal's efforts to comply with U.S. child-pornography laws. (Oddly, the site also gained a following in Russia, which led to its acquisition by Sup.) All that adds up to an environment even more...

Ashley Qualls doesn't sound like a typical high school student. Maybe that's because the 17-year-old is the CEO of a million-dollar business. Ashley is the head of whateverlife.com, a website she started when she was just 14 — with eight dollars borrowed from her mother. Now, just three years later, the website grosses more than $1 million a year, providing Ashley and her working class family a sense of security they had never really known. It all started with capitalism 101, the law of supply and demand. Ashley became interested in graphic design just as the online social networking craze...

Newsvine.com, a new type of news site created by four former Disney/ABCNEWs.com employees, is now up and running in beta. CyberJournalist.net has been invited to join the beta and is impressed with what it's seen so far. The site is a slick combination of some of the trendiest news-related tools online now, incorporating news aggregation, social networking, citizen journalism, blogging, user ratings and online discussions. Think of it as one-part Slashdot, one-part del.icio.us and one-part Google News, with a few other neat features thrown in. The site is built around four general actions: reading, discussing, writing and seeding the news....