Your privacy in the news

Here is some recent news I learned from links posted by Electronic Frontier Foundation. Carrier IQ’s code is raising lots of questions:

“Consumers need to know that their safety and privacy are being protected by the companies they trust with their sensitive information,” Franken said Thursday. “The revelation that the locations and other sensitive data of millions of Americans are being secretly recorded and possibly transmitted is deeply troubling. This news underscores the need for Congress to act swiftly to protect the location information and private, sensitive information of consumers. But right now, Carrier IQ has a lot of questions to answer.”
Amazon’s new browser, Silk, is raising concerns. (Senator Ed Markey is asking some good questions here):

Amazon told a Massachusetts congressman that the Silk browser in its Kindle Fire tablet doesn't pose a privacy threat to consumers, but the lawmaker wasn't ready to give the online retailer a pass. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the co-chairman of a congressional caucus on consumer privacy, on Tuesday released the retailer's responses to questions he had put to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in October about Silk and the data it collected.

Markey wasn't happy with Amazon's answers.

"Amazon's responses to my inquiries do not provide enough detail about how the company intends to use customer information, beyond acknowledging that the company uses this valuable information," said Markey in a statement.

New outrageous bill invites government to snoop.

The bill would allow a broad swath of ISPs and other private entities to "use cybersecurity systems" to collect and share masses of user data with the government, other businesses, or "any other entity" so long as it’s for a vaguely-defined "cybersecurity purpose." It would trump existing privacy statutes that strictly limit the interception and disclosure of your private communications data, as well as any other state or federal law that might get in the way. Indeed, the language may be broad enough to bless the covert use of spyware if done in "good faith" for a "cybersecurity purpose."

EFF is an excellent source of new on the issues of privacy and censorship. Here is an excerpt from the About page:

From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990 — well before the Internet was on most people's radar — and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.

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Media rigging elections

This Huffpo article illustrates how the "news media" determines what candidates are acceptable before the People ever have a chance to vote for them. FOX has decided that it is time to pull Mitt Romney down and to prop up Newt Gingrich. FOX is but one media voice, but it is an especially strong one for many people who will be voting republican. Last election cycle, for example, FOX worked hard to make sure that Ron Paul didn't get the nomination--it was my sense that had FOX gotten behind him, he might have become the nominee. It is my belief that the cumulative effect of these sorts of media positions almost completely decide who the nominees of both parties will be. I suspect that if FOX wanted Romney to soar in the polls, they have enough influence to make that happen, but they don't want that to happen, so they will peck away to make Romney look "plastic," or whatever needs to be said to steer the audience away from him. The net result of this media input is that the media has influence--too much influence--over who will be the nominees of both parties. The media decides who are the "serious" candidates.  Eventually, the people get to vote on one of only two viable candidates, one a Democrat and other a Republican. That's one choice greater than countries (like the old Soviet Union) whose political systems are entirely corrupt.

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The dark side of the new military authorization bill

Glenn Greenwald spells out the concerns we should all have with the new military authorization bill (2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)), well on its way to passage:

Here are the bill’s three most important provisions:
(1) mandates that all accused Terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; it also unquestionably permits (but does not mandate) that even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil accused of Terrorism be held by the military rather than charged in the civilian court system (Sec. 1032); (2) renews the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) with more expansive language: to allow force (and military detention) against not only those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and countries which harbored them, but also anyone who “substantially supports” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces” (Sec. 1031); and, (3) imposes new restrictions on the U.S. Government’s ability to transfer detainees out of Guantanamo (Secs. 1033-35).
There are several very revealing aspects to all of this. First, the 9/11 attack happened more than a decade ago; Osama bin Laden is dead; the U.S. Government claims it has killed virtually all of Al Qaeda’s leadership and the group is “operationally ineffective” in the Afghan-Pakistan region; and many commentators insisted that these developments would mean that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. And yet here we have the Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, acting not only to re-affirm the war but to expand it even further: by formally declaring that the entire world (including the U.S.) is a battlefield and the war will essentially go on forever.

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