Category: News You Need to Know

A Nation of Laws

The United States is a nation of laws, a lot of laws:

About 40,000 state laws taking effect at the start of the new year will change rules about getting abortions in New Hampshire, learning about gays and lesbians in California, getting jobs in Alabama and even driving golf carts in Georgia.

Several federal rules change with the new year, too, including a Social Security increase amounting to $450 a year for the average recipients and stiff fines up to $2,700 per offense for truckers and bus drivers caught using hand-held cellphones while driving.

40,000 new state laws taking effect this year? The “ignorance of the laws isn’t an excuse” excuse is no longer valid. Nobody can possibly hope to know 40,000 laws, and those are only the new ones on the books this year.

Obama is the Touch of Death for Companies

Sua Eccellenza Barack Obama, Capo del Governo, Duce del Fascismo e Fondatore dell’Impero has some very powerful abilities. He can just mention a company during his State of the Union address causing them to instantly go bankrupt:

Andrew Restuccia of The Hill is reporting that Ener1, a battery company that President Obama referenced in his State of The Union Speech on Tuesday as an example of successful energy investments, has just filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

That’s just two days after the speech.

I believe it’s obvious for all to see that Obama’s words are the touch of death for any company. First Solyndra and now Ener1, I wonder what that next company Obama will point to as a successful investment only to see it go into bankruptcy shortly afterwards. Does this power extent to government agencies? If so I have a list of government agencies for Obama to mention.

Chalk Another One Up to Private Intervention

Those clamoring for more government oversight of the environment, food, drugs, and everything else seem to entirely miss the fact that the government is never actually good at overseeing anything. On the other hand private individuals are far more likely to actually investigate or even stumble upon violations of property rights. An amateur model airplane pilot recently stumbled across a meat packing plant dumping untold amounts of waste into a local river:

A tip from an anonymous amateur unmanned-aerial-vehicle pilot is what led Texas authorities to open a major criminal investigation into the waste practices of a Dallas meat packing plant.

The Environmental Protection Agency, The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), and Texas Parks and Wildlife are investigating whether a Dallas meat packing plant was sending its wastewater to a local river after images from an amateur UAV pilot showed a river behind the plant “full of blood.” The Columbia Meat packing plant sits along a creek that runs into the Trinity River.

The contamination was noticed by the operator after reviewing images he’d taken of the Trinity River while flying a homemade UAV, according to Small Unmanned Aerial Systems News (sUAS), a Web site that tracks unmanned vehicle-related news.

You have to love how the news is now referring to model airplanes as unmanned aerial vehicles. Back to the point though you’ll notice that even though the government supposedly inspects meat packing plants they somehow managed to miss the massive amount of waster being dumped into the nearby river.

Of course the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is going to investigate and likely fine the plant but I doubt those living along that river, people who had their property contaminated, will be compensated in any way. Hell we may find out that the meat packing plant was given one of those exemption from environmental laws that the EPA is so fond of handing out.

FBI Ramping Up Surveillance of Social Media

Do you use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter? If so you should know that the Stasi is watching your every post:

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly. The plans show that the bureau believes it can use information pulled from social media sites to better respond to crises, and maybe even to foresee them.

The information comes from a document released on 19 January looking for companies who might want to build a monitoring system for the FBI. It spells out what the bureau wants from such a system and invites potential contractors to reply by 10 February.

The bureau’s wish list calls for the system to be able to automatically search “publicly available” material from Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for keywords relating to terrorism, surveillance operations, online crime and other FBI missions. Agents would be alerted if the searches produce evidence of “breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats”.

Of course what information is “publicly available” to you and “publicly available” to the government are entirely different. It’s a well known fact that many, if not most, popular Internet sites share their information with the state. Be careful what you post online because there is no such thing as private data.

It Will Cost $320 Million to Upgrade The IRS Website

I run this website on commodity hardware sitting in my apartment. Needless to say my costs are negligible and consiste of the server, electricity, and an Internet connection. A larger entity that has mission critical servers running twenty-four hours a day, like Amazon, is going to sink a much larger chunk of change into their infrastructure (at least I hope so). Of course Amazon will establish exact lists of needed upgrades and expansion before going forth because they have to maintain profits. What happens when the Internal Revenue Service (Revenuers) decided to upgrade their site? They claim to need $320 million but submit no actual plan:

IRS’ current $320 million investment for its website includes new, more secure portals so that taxpayers can access more information. The new website is expected to go online in 2013.

However, the IRS needs to be more strategic about exactly what online customer services it intends to improve, and what it hopes to achieve, the GAO said.

“IRS does not have concrete plans that define what additional online services the new website will ultimately provide and how much the services will cost,” the report said. “To their credit, IRS officials have begun developing a roadmap that identifies some online services they would like to provide, and IRS has periodically added new online services in the past. However, the roadmap omits several fundamental elements.“

I guess it costs a lot of money to upgrade a website that exists only to assist in the act of theft from the entire United States populace. It would be nice if we knew exactly why it costs that much money though but the Revenuers must have decided we don’t need to know that. If government agencies had to run like private businesses they would be putting for very detailed plans consisting of exact costs and explain how those costs will provide long-term benefits that exceed those initial costs. Instead the government has a blank check and never has to justify any expenditure. Needing more money isn’t a problem for them because they can simply steal more form the populace in the form of tax increases.

I have a simple demand: if government officials are going to demand that everybody pay their “fair share” of taxes then the government must put forth detailed spending reports that account for every dollar that goes out along with justification for those costs.

For those who want to read the Government Accountability Office’s (you have to love how the government gets to determine its own accountability using its own office) report it can be found here [PDF].

Your Health is Irrelevant in The War on Drugs

The war on drugs, like prohibition, has turned out to be nothing but a money sinkhole that promotes violent crime. Any person with a couple of properly firing synapses would say the American people certainly aren’t getting any return on the government’s investment in preventing many of those same people from using various verboten substances. Now the government is stepping up its game and plainly informing the citizenry that their health matters not when it comes to preventing drugs from entering this country:

A 63-page set of specifications (PDF), heavily redacted, obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center through the Freedom of Information Act, says the scanners must “be based on X-Ray or gamma technology,” which use potentially dangerous ionizing radiation at high energies, and “shall be capable of scanning cars, SUVs, motorcycles and busses.”

“Society will pay a huge price in cancer because of this,” John Sedat, professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco, told CNET. Sedat has raised concerns about the health risks of X-ray scanners, and the European Commission in November prohibited their use in European airports.

In other words those entering or leaving the country will have to submit to scans by devices that use radition known to cause cancer. According to the United States government no price is too high to pay for the war on drugs, even if that price is your health.

Judge Order Violates Fifth Amendment Protections

I understand the Bill of Rights has been relegated to the back room of a dusty library but it would be nice if the government would at least pretent to abide by it onces in a while. A judge has ordered a woman to decrypt her laptop harddrive so that prosecutors can used the data to nail her to the wall:

A judge on Monday ordered a Colorado woman to decrypt her laptop computer so prosecutors can use the files against her in a criminal case.

The defendant, accused of bank fraud, had unsuccessfully argued that being forced to do so violates the Fifth Amendment’s protection against compelled self-incrimination.

“I conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer,” Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn ruled Monday. (.pdf)

The judge ruled incorrectly. Let’s take a look at the text of the Fifth Amendment:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Emphasis added to the part that is relevant to this story. According to the Bill of Rights you may not be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against yourself. By having to reveals her decryption key the woman is being compelled to be a witness against herself. Sadly our country gives the government the ability to both declare and interpret law meaning their definition of the Fifth Amendment directly opposes the reading of it whenever it’s convenient:

The government had argued that there was no Fifth Amendment breach, and that it might “require significant resources and may harm the subject computer” if the authorities tried to crack the encryption.

In other words the Fifth Amendment doesn’t come into play if it would make it difficult for the government to prosecute you. It seems that TrueCrypt’s plausible deniability may be a person’s only protection against being forced to reveal their decryption keys.

Minnesota Police Moving to Legalize Illegal Searches

While the police state is most prominent in states like New York and California it has slowly been making its way to Minnesota since, at least, the Republic National Convention that took place in St. Paul in 2008. Now the enforcement arm of the state is demanding that they be given the authority to perform warrantless searching of Minnesota citizens:

Law enforcement officials plan to ask the Legislature this year for the right to collect intelligence information on citizens without having to publicly disclose who they are monitoring or why.

It’s a proposal that drew sharp warnings and concerns from public records and transparency advocates at a meeting today where a variety of changes to state public data laws were discussed.

The head of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, Dave Pecchia, said the proposal to collect intelligence information on suspected terrorists, gang members or other suspected criminals is essential to ensure public safety to citizens in Minnesota. He said Minnesota is one of two states that doesn’t have that classification of data and it hinders the ability to share information with law enforcement officials in other states.

What’s interesting is the fact the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association aren’t just demanding this power to spy on “terrorists” but also gang members and “other suspect criminals.” In other words every dissident group is going to find itself subject to Stasi-esque searches. I wonder when they will start asking for the power to indefinitely detain Minnesotans without charges?

You know what? New Hampshire is sounding better every day.

Greatest Campaign Stunt Ever

While I still haven’t made up my mind on Rand Paul he continues to impress me. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has detained the senator because he refused to be sexually molested by a government thug:

Paul’s office confirmed he set off an airport security full-body scanner “on a glitch,” according to a spokesman.

The Paul staffer said TSA agents would not let Paul walk back through the body scanner and were demanding a full body pat-down.

The Paul spokesman said his office called TSA administrator John Pistole about the incident this morning.
The U.S. Constitution actually protects federal lawmakers from detention while they’re on the way to the capital.

So he setup of the scanner, offered to walk back through the scanner to verify, and then TSA agent who was chomping at the bit to feel somebody up decided that wasn’t good enough. Of course the TSA is claiming they never detained Paul:

“When an irregularity is found during the TSA screening process, it must be resolved prior to allowing a passenger to proceed to the secure area of the airport,” according to an official statement released by TSA. “Passengers who refuse to complete the screening process cannot be granted access to the secure area in order to ensure the safety of others traveling.”

This is also the same agency that lied about the safety of these body scanners so I’m more inclined to believe Paul’s statement about being detained. Either way it does boil down to a he said she said argument.

Let me give Paul some serious points for refusing to be sexual molested. On that note let me also take away points for submitting to the body scanner in the first place. Still refusing the pat down does take some balls, especially in this police state.

Just because it’s predictable can you guess where our Dear Leader stands on this issue? I’m sure you already guessed that the White House sided with the TSA thugs:

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday that he didn’t have any reaction to Paul’s “police state” comments.

But Carney sided with the TSA saying, “I think it is absolutely essential that we take necessary actions to ensure that air travel is safe.”

That last comment is some major doublespeak. Those body scanners aren’t necessary for airport security as demonstrated by the fact we haven’t had another terrorist hijacking since 9/11 even though body scanners have only recently been implemented. The TSA will gladly take credit for the lack of hijackings but truth be told hijackings were exceedingly rare before 9/11 when airports handled their own security.

Truthfully the White House doesn’t care about security, they care about control.

United States Federal Government Reneges on Promise to Allow an Evicted 101 Year-Old Woman to Return Home

A 101 year-old woman was evicted from her home but later promised she could reenter the premisses by the federal government. Of course a requirement to become a government busybody is the ability to lie and that’s exactly what the federal government did to this woman:

The federal government now says a 101-year-old Detroit woman it promised could move back into her foreclosed home four months ago can’t return because the building’s unsanitary and unsafe.

Texana Hollis was evicted Sept. 12 and her belongings placed outside after her 65-year-old son failed to pay property taxes linked to a reverse mortgage, The Detroit News reported Sunday. Two days later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said she could return.

But now, HUD said it won’t let Hollis move back in because of the house’s condition. She had lived there about 60 years.

“Here I am, 100 years old, and don’t have a home,” Hollis said, rounding off her age. “Oh Lord, help me.”

The reason this woman was evicted is entirely irrelevant, the federal government promised her she could return home and reneged on that promise. If you are a resident of Detroit or know somebody who is that may help I’m sure it would be greatly appreciated if you contacted them to see if they could provide any assistance or contacts of people who could help. When our government works against the people it is up to the people to help one another. Mutual aid is the only option we truly to have to help one another.