BIG BROTHER in the age of INTERNET # (Ongoing - Links, Articles & Videos)

Official List Of Words Feds Monitor On Social Networking Sites
Alexander Higgins, Contributing Writer
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Activist Post

The Feds have been forced to release their social network monitoring manual, which contains the list of words the government watches on social media and news sites.

Earlier the Huffington Post reported on the Feds have been forced to give up their list of words they monitor on Facebook, Twitter, and comments being posted on news articles, so I compiled that list below.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

Report reveals Facebook spying on smartphone users’ text messages, other privacy breaches
Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Monday, February 27, 2012
Activist Post

A report published by the London Sunday Times has revealed that Facebook has been accessing and reading the personal text messages of users of their social networking app.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

Interpol says suspected Anonymous hackers arrested
Feb 29 2012

Interpol said that 25 suspected members of the loose-knit Anonymous hacker movement have been arrested in a sweep across Europe and South America.

The international police agency said in a statement Tuesday that the arrests in Argentina, Chile,Colombia and Spain were carried out by national law enforcement officers working under the support of Interpol’s Latin American Working Group of Experts on Information Technology Crime.

The suspects, aged between 17 and 40, are suspected of planning coordinated cyberattacks against institutions including Colombia’s defense ministry and presidential websites, Chile’s Endesa electricity company and national library, as well as other targets.

CONTINUE: [link to zen-haven.dk]

New smartphone app ushers in the digital age of citizen spying
Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Activist Post

The West Virginia Department of Homeland Security released an app for mobile phones they have called the “Suspicious Activity Reporting” application.

This application will allow for citizens to report “suspicious persons” more easily than ever before, ushering in the digital age of citizen spying, a thought which would make Stalin and those like him drool with envy.

The new application was recently unveiled by the Department of Homeland Security’s branch in West Virginia in concert with the office of the governor of West Virginia and if it is successful it could likely see a much wider distribution.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

Last Edited by RoXY on 03/04/2012 05:23 AM

Turning the tables on Big Brother: Now internet users can watch who is spying on them in blow against Google's new snooping policy

Through the Big Wobble:
[link to bigwobblenews.blogspot.com]

- Free Collusion add-on shows which companies watch as you browse
- 'Real time' illustration of marketing companies snooping
- Unveiled as Google shifts privacy policy to enable more advertising
- Mozilla aims to share data with privacy campaigners

Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has unveiled a new add-on for the popular web browser that gives web users an instant view of which companies are 'watching' them as they browse.
The move comes the same week that Google pushed ahead with its controversial new privacy policy, built to provide even more data for Google's $28 billion advertising business - despite concerns that the massive harvesting of private data might be illegal in many countries.

The Collusion add-on will allow users to 'pull back the curtain' on web advertising firms and other third parties that track people's online movements, says Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs.

read on: [link to www.dailymail.co.uk]

Last Edited by RoXY on 03/04/2012 05:45 AM

CrimePush: yet another citizen spy application for smartphones
Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Activist Post

Recently I reported on the concerted effort to bring citizen spying into the digital age with applications on smartphones which can be used to report “suspicious activity” to local homeland security fusion centers.

This has expanded even more thanks to the hard work of individuals like 25-year-old Eman Pahlevani, a student at the University of New Hampshire School of Law.

Pahlevani launched an application last month called CrimePush after several months of development with his brother and a friend.

The application allows users to send in reports in the form of text, pictures or video directly to local law enforcement after police dispatch centers set up their accounts with CrimePush.

After the dispatchers have registered, users of Android-based devices and Apple iPhones within the given area are able to download the application dedicated to that location and start sending in tips, no matter how erroneous.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

Senator Schumer calls for FTC investigation into Google and Apple privacy policies
Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Activist Post

United States Senator Charles “Chuck” Schumer has recommended that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigate the reports which claim that applications available on Apple’s iOS platform and Google’s Android operating system are able to steal private photographs and other personal information from users.

I previously reported on this widespread practice which, in fact, is far from secret as much of the abilities of such applications are outlined in the Android Market listings.

However, as I pointed out in my article, the majority of users do not even bother to read the privacy policy of services they use or applications they buy.

While the Apple App Store has one overarching privacy policy, the Android Market allows for different privacy policies for individual applications which opens the door to applications having much more access to personal data than one might assume.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

Google/YouTube has placed restrictions on yet another video

Google/YouTube has placed restrictions on yet another video that exposes the fraudulent claims of the TSA and highlights how the federal agency’s security theatre is part of a wider social manipulation agenda.

This video keeps getting taken down by youtube censorship.... Enjoy while you still can...

Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable
By David Kravets
March 6, 2012

When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last week, it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was registered with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Working around that, the feds went directly to VeriSign, a U.S.-based internet backbone company that has the contract to manage the coveted .com and other “generic” top-level domains.

EasyDNS, an internet infrastructure company, protested that the “ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc. needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of U.S. federal and state lawmakers.”

But despite EasyDNS and others’ outrage, the U.S. government says it’s gone that route hundreds of times. Furthermore, it says it has the right to seize any .com, .net and .org domain name because the companies that have the contracts to administer them are based on United States soil, according to Nicole Navas, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman.

CONTINUE: [link to www.wired.com]

PsyWarfare: "The Battle for the Mind"
by Adrian Salbuchi
March 11, 2012
New Dawn Magazine

As with all totalitarian regimes, the black/white or the good/bad Baby Bush “You’re either with us or you’re with the Terrorists” – binary rhetoric lies at the heart of the Global Power Elite’s PsyWar technology.

In 2004, Denis Boneau, a French journalist writing for the Voltaire Network, published an article called “The Science of World Domination” (www.voltairenet.org/The-Science-of-World-Domination), making an excellent summary of key milestones in the development of the United States’ post-World War II Global Psychological Warfare Strategy.

He starts by describing the Truman Doctrine of “Containment” of the former Soviet Union that was based on the so-called “long telegram” sent to the State Department in 1946 by an advisor in the US embassy in Moscow – and key Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) scholar – George S. Kennan.

Shortly afterwards, Kennan was called back to the US to brief his superiors more fully and his recommendations were finally published in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, the official journal of the CFR, as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” This became known as the “X” article because that’s how Kennan signed it, as there was still heated debated as to whether it would become official US foreign policy.

It did. With his highly influential article, Kennan gave birth to the US policy of “Containment” of the Soviet Union which consisted in blocking the expansion of communism through the control of national emancipationist movements that could lead to greater power to pro-socialist or nationalist leaders.

As official policy, “Containment” required the collaboration of experts capable of providing geographical, economic, cultural, psychological and sociological data useful to the US Armed Forces and the intelligence community, working very closely with key think tanks like the CFR.

CONTINUE: [link to globalresearch.ca]

Court Declares Newspaper Excerpt on Online Forum is Fair Use, Righthaven in Ruins
Kurt Opsahl
Monday, March 12, 2012
EFF

Late Friday, the federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits.

The judgment – part of the nuisance lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven – found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt, with a link back to the newspaper's website.

Judge Roger Hunt’s judgment confirms that an online forum is not liable for its users’ posts, even if it was not protected by the safe harbors of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice and takedown provisions. The decision also clarifies that a common practice on the Internet – excerpting a few sentences and linking to interesting articles elsewhere – is a fair use, not an infringement of copyright.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

ISPs Will Start Acting As Hollywood's Private Online Security Guards By July
March 14, 2012

Last July, we wrote about how the major ISPs had agreed to a "voluntary" "six strikes" plan (really five strikes, but everyone calls it six...) to start acting as Hollywood's private online security guards. And, by "voluntary" we mean without any input from the actual stake holders (customers) and with significant pressure being applied by the Obama administration. Since then, nothing has been heard, but the RIAA's Cary Sherman has now said that the ISPs involved will roll out their plans by July of this year, a year after the agreement went into place.

Sherman says that the plan had always been to give them a year to deal with the technical aspects of setting up the plan: "Each isp has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system," Sherman said. They need this "for establishing the database so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion."

CONTINUE: [link to www.techdirt.com]

Internet service providers to launch biggest digital spying operation in history on July 12
Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Monday, March 19, 2012
Activist Post

Internet service providers (ISPs) across the United States are set to voluntarily begin a digital surveillance operation so large that nothing can even come close in the history of espionage.

Starting on July 12, 2012, if you download software, videos or music which are potentially protected by copyright, you very well might find yourself targeted by any of America’s behemoth ISPs.

Possibly the most troubling aspect of this is that these corporations are putting these so-called anti-piracy measures in place on a wholly voluntary basis in accordance with a deal with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Obama White House.

After that date, some users might find their bandwidth choked off completely until they sign some kind of agreement saying that they will not download materials which are potentially protected by copyright.

The RIAA and MPAA have been making a concerted effort to stifle internet freedom under the guise of fighting piracy across the world, largely with the help of the government of the United States.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

Is your TV watching you? Latest models raise concerns
Samsung
Gary Merson
March 20, 2012

The new Samsung HDTV has hard-wired camera and microphone, plus face recognition and other unprecedented features.

Samsung’s 2012 top-of-the-line plasmas and LED HDTVs offer new features never before available within a television including a built-in, internally wired HD camera, twin microphones, face tracking and speech recognition. While these features give you unprecedented control over an HDTV, the devices themselves, more similar than ever to a personal computer, may allow hackers or even Samsung to see and hear you and your family, and collect extremely personal data.

While Web cameras and Internet connectivity are not new to HDTVs, their complete integration is, and it's the always connected camera and microphones, combined with the option of third-party apps (not to mention Samsung's own software) gives us cause for concern regarding the privacy of TV buyers and their friends and families.

Samsung has not released a privacy policy clarifying what data it is collecting and sharing with regard to the new TV sets. And while there is no current evidence of any particular security hole or untoward behavior by Samsung's app partners, Samsung has only stated that it "assumes no responsibility, and shall not be liable" in the event that a product or service is not "appropriate."

CONTINUE: [link to www.technolog.msnbc.msn.com]

French President Sarkozy Seizes Opportunity for Internet Censorship After Terror Attack
Jillian C. York
Friday, March 23, 2012
EFF

In the wake of a horrific rampage, in which Mohamed Merah (now dead after a 32-hour standoff with police) reportedly murdered three French soldiers, three young Jewish schoolchildren, and a rabbi, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has begun calling for criminal penalties for citizens who visit web sites that advocate for terror or hate. "From now on, any person who habitually consults Web sites that advocate terrorism or that call for hatred and violence will be criminally punished," Sarkozy was reported as saying.

Apart from the obvious flaws in Sarkozy's plan - users, can, of course, use anonymizing tools to view the material or simply access it from a variety of locations to avoid appearing as "habitual" viewers - there are numerous other reasons to be concerned about criminalizing access to information.

First, there's no guarantee that criminalizing access to hate speech or terrorist content will end the very real problems of hate crime and terrorism. Extremist violence didn't start with the Internet and it won't end with it, either.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

Is nothing off limits? Now Google plans to spy on background noise in your phone calls to bombard you with tailored adverts - Patent also describes using other environmental factors such as air temperature to produce ads
By Ted Thornhill
22 March 2012

Adverts could soon be tailored according to the background noise around you when using your smartphone, if a patent application by Google becomes reality.

The search engine giant has filed for a patent called ‘Advertising based on environmental conditions’.

As that title implies, it’s not just background sounds that could be used to determine what adverts you seen on your mobile phone. The patent also describes using ‘temperature, humidity, light and air composition’ to produced targeted adverts.

Read more: [link to www.dailymail.co.uk]

10 Reasons Why Nothing You Do On The Internet Will Ever Be Private Again
Michael Snyder, Contributor
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Activist Post

The Internet is rapidly being transformed into a Big Brother control grid where privacy rights are being systematically strangled to death. The control freaks that run things have become absolutely obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that you do on the Internet. One thing that you can count on is that nothing you do on the Internet will ever be private again. In fact, if you are obsessed with privacy then the last place you want to be is on the Internet.

Most Americans have absolutely no idea how far Internet surveillance has advanced in the past few years. At this point, it would be hard to imagine any place less private than the Internet. Do not ever put anything on the Internet that you would not want the authorities or your employer to hold you accountable for.

Basically, the Internet is creating a permanent dossier on each one of us, and we contribute to this process by freely posting gigantic volumes of information about ourselves on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. The Internet is the greatest tool for mass communication that the world has perhaps ever seen, and it gives average citizens the ability to communicate with each other like never before, but there is also a downside to using the Internet. Everything that we do on the Internet is being watched, monitored and recorded and there is no longer any such thing as Internet privacy. If you think that you still have any privacy on the Internet, then you are either ignorant of what is going on or you are being delusional. The following are 10 reasons why nothing you do on the Internet will ever be private again....

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

The author should speak for himself. I never once opened an account on "social media" like that. I never had a "blog" either (which was the beginning of it all). All I ever did was create a youtube account in 2003 so I could see stuff that wasn't for kiddies, and I never favourited anything, posted anything, or commented on anything. I also never visited using my home IP address (just like I'm not on my home IP right now).

I'll read the rest of the article later (at lunch), but it just bothers me sometimes when I get lumped into this "oh hey guise, we've all been tricked" when I was always branded as 'paranoid' for being this vigilant about my online privacy YEEEARS ago.

Also, that youtube account is long gone because they kept demanding I link to other accounts, supply more info or create a channel in order to keep it. Fuck them.

LoL @ 13.0.0.0.0 ! I'm with ya man.

Bad User Agent!

Me neither...

You should, it's a good piece of work - although much of it will probably hold no eye-opening, new insights for you... :)

Thanx for your nice message! Much appericiated!

You should make a twitter

I don't have a mobile phone...