Your Emails Now Belong to O

Calling liberals out on their double standards now that their guy is in office has become quite the hobby of mine. One of the most exaggerated claims about Bush is that he significantly eroded our civil liberties through things like the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping.

Fair enough, Bush did some shady things. But even if he wire-tapped international calls without a warrant, he did not go snooping through our email accounts for local law enforcement purposes. That is precisely what the Obama Administration wants to do.

Talk about kicking it up a notch.

I wish I could say I’m surprised that no major news outlet except Drudge reported this story. I wish I could say I am surprised at the underwhelming response from the same people who protested President Bush so vehemently. I wish. This is proof that there really are two standards – one for liberals and one for conservatives.

In case you actually care (instead of just pretend-care like Bush-haters) here’s the deal with warrantless email hacking: Relying on a 1986 pre-internet law dealing with electronic data storage, the Obama Administration has been arguing that emails opened and kept in your account for over 180 days are not subject to Fourth Amendment warrant requirements. Even the liberal 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has the highest Supreme Court turn-over rate of any of the circuits, agrees that the Constitution is more important than some law Congress enacted before Al Gore created the internet.

Still, somehow a piss-ant magistrate judge in Colorado found solid ground to grant Obama’s request to snoop through our emails. In his decision, the judge held that there is “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in emails that are over 180 days old. Can you freaking believe that? No reasonable expectation! Only lawyers could convince themselves of such a ridiculous argument.

Thus, because the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 apparently overrules the U.S. Constitution, we no longer enjoy the same privacy in our emails that we do with snail mail. Until the Supreme Court steps in, it’s quite possible that your emails are fair game depending on the jurisdiction in which you live.

At least Bush was only intercepting international phone calls and not citizen-to-citizen communication within the United States. The Supreme Court has long held that the Constitution does not extend to anyone or anything crossing international borders, but that’s irrelevant because liberals manifestly do not care about facts when they decide to protest civil liberties.

So beware: If your private information is stored anywhere other than your bedroom hardrive, it’s no longer private. That’s what this judge’s ruling boils down to. It’s shocking, but what Obama wants, Obama gets.

This is the same administration that just nationalized healthcare and plans to put our medical records into a national electronic database. A few weeks after assuring us that our medical records would be kept confidential, Obama now wants to snoop through private emails without probable cause. Can you imagine the reaction if Bush had pulled something like this?

The scary thing is that this has even broader implications than one instance of a disregard for the Fourth Amendment. The same administration that wants to peek into our emails now gets another selection for the U.S. Supreme Court and will also hand-pick countless other lower courts appointees, including constitutionally-illiterate Goodwin Liu.

We continue to see what he meant by “Change,” my friends. Just when reciting 2008 campaign slogans becomes more than a little cliché, O’ swoops in and breathes new life into our little game. This time he’s doing it through an ideological takeover of the judiciary.

Liberal judges disregard the Constitution so our emails can be read without a warrant. They misread the Constitution when holding we can’t step aside for two minutes on National Prayer Day but somehow decide that we still have to buy tax-payer funded copies of the Koran for Guantanamo detainees. Oh and by the way, their next step is to allow warrantless cell phone tracking so Big Brother will know our whereabouts 24/7.

How’s that for intrusions on our civil liberties? Where have all the Bush-haters gone? If the lack of outcry from lefties purportedly valuing civil liberties is not the epitome of hypocrisy, I don’t know what is.

The Census is Getting Personal

This is an expose’ of the Census Bureau. This video http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=RsDhkPym01k itemizes the fundamental legal questions the Census Bureau refuses or fails to answer about its collection and use of personal information from every American (see questions below). This program aired on Matrix News Network (syndicated national television) in January of 2010.

Without any apparent authority the Census Bureau has expanded it’s information gathering activities. In addition to the once-in-10-years Census authorized by the Constitution, the Census Bureau conducts more in-depth “Surveys” of 250,000 Americans every month of every year. It has no Constitutional authority for that, in fact the Bureau is violating the 4th Amendment to the Bill of Rights by suggesting that Americans are “obligated” to provide any personal information whatsoever to government.

The Constitution allows the government to count people once every ten years, but does not require any American to BE COUNTED, OR TO PROVIDE ANY INFORMATION AT ALL, much less to provide personal information to the temporary worker and stranger who comes to your door with a Census Bureau badge.

Americans have been given very false impressions and presumptions of the authority of government to invade their lives. Even the Census takers themselves are sometimes misinformed of the limits of government.

Once your information is out there, it is out there for good. There is no such thing as a “secure database” in government. Government data is bought, lost, stolen and viewed every day by everyone from law enforcement to criminals at all levels of society. Spill your life to strangers at your front door or on the “questionnaire” at your own risk. Beyond that is the question, if we agree to pass over our private information to bureaucrats, is there any limit to what they will ask for next?

My reason for producing this video and for posting it on YouTube is that I see so many people everywhere who don’t seem to understand that the USA has become something very different than the country of our origin, and we have ALREADY lost many of the rights and freedoms that were given to us by nature (God?) and were protected for us again in our Constitution. Our Constitutional framers never imagined the spending, waste, taxation intrusion and aggression that our government now commits without restraint.

How did that happen? When our government pushes us we fail to push back so, after many decades of that, government simply sees no boundaries at all on its own presumed force and authority.

It is our government. It is our servant. Government can have no authority but which it derives from us. But government employees, officials and representatives do need to be reminded of that on a regular basis.

There is a pdf file of the Census Bureau’s AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY Questionnaire at: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/SBasics…

If you are not disturbed by the questions they will ask you then you are not reading it carefully.

QUESTIONS THAT THE CENSUS BUREAU REFUSED OR FAILED TO ANSWER (from Jerry Day’s Matrix News Network segment: “The Census Is Getting Personal”) I strongly suggest asking these questions of your Census Taker, especially if they show up with an “American Community Survey” form:

1. The Constitution authorizes government to count people but it does not authorize the taking of private information or even the names of individuals. From where does the Census Bureau derive authority to demand our private information?
2. Is there any limit to the amount and type of private information that the Census bureau may demand and collect?
3. Under what Constitutional authority does the Census Bureau collect information now from 250,000 people per month of every year?
4. The 4th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits government search and seizure of private information without a court warrant based on probable cause. Current Census policies violate that Amendment do they not?
5. By what Constitutional authority does the Census Bureau threaten penalties for failure to provide personal information?
6. The Census Bureau claims it maintains privacy of personal information. Are there any circumstances under which law enforcement or spy agencies can access Census information?
7. Since presumably Census data may be subpoenaed by law enforcement, may individuals refuse to answer questions according to the fifth Amendment?
8. Why has the Census Bureau decided to collect GPS coordinates for every home?
9. Virtually every government database has been either lost, hacked or compromised. Would the Census Bureau’s claim of data security not be an outright lie or at best highly improbable?
10. How would the Census Bureau locate, protect and compensate those individuals whose data becomes compromised?

Big Brother Wants to Track Cell Phones

School Board Accused of Snooping On Students Via Webcams

Well, folks, I was wrong. When I said there was nothing to fear from Orwellian statists using technology to monitor our behavior. There’s no risk of that, the real risk is people being so fast and loose with their own personal information online that they become their own Little Brother, rather than the Big Brother George Orwell made infamous.

On the other hand…

A lawsuit filed against a Philadelphia-area school board has made extremely alarming accusations. According to the lawsuit — which has yet to be heard and is thus, of course, unproven — high school student Blake Robbins was hauled into the principal’s office, where he was allegedly accused of selling drugs. The proof? Apparently, the school had photographic evidence of Robbins with pills. The problem is, the “evidence” was obtained when the school remotely activated the web-camera in Robbins’ computer, while he was at home. Needless to say, this was done without his knowledge or consent.

For years people have pointed to the novel 1984 as the ultimate surveillance society model: While you’re watching government propaganda on your television, government agents are watching you back, monitoring your every twitch and mumbled word. The allusions have often been somewhat abstract, with people warning that e-mail monitoring at work or a police camera on a busy street corner are a step towards that bleak fiction. And yet, if students were indeed being monitored, this isn’t like 1984, this practically is 1984.

The school board, which runs two high schools in an affluent neighborhood, has 2,300 Apple laptop computers that it issues to students. These computers have webcams built into them. The school has conceded that it had the ability to remotely activate the cameras in case the computers were ever stolen or missing, in the hopes of recovering them, and claims that 42 such activations have resulted in the recovery of 18 computers. They haven’t commented specifically on the allegations made by the Robbins family, but have said that as a result of the furor, they have deactivated the remote activation feature in all the computers. (Ironically, they probably did that remotely, but I digress.)

If these allegations hold up, this is horrifying. Over the last few years I have chuckled at stories of people, whose iPhones or laptops were stolen, fighting back by using various remote activated features to identify, harass and humiliate the thief. But if the claims made by Robbins are accurate, the school was literally spying upon students in their own homes, and upon seeing something inappropriate, decided to take action.

In this case, it seems as though the school official felt she was acting to help a student who was going astray. (The family claims what she thought were illicit pills was in fact candy.) The school board’s own statements haven’t much helped their cause: “We believe that the administrator at Harriton has been unfairly portrayed and unjustly attacked in connection with her attempts to be supportive of a student and his family. The district never did and never would use such tactics as a basis for disciplinary action.”

Umm, pardon me, but I don’t think people are objecting to how you used the spy footage, but the fact that you were spying on your students in the first place. If you don’t get that, well, you need a whole new legal team, maybe with some PR experts thrown in for good measure.

Because it doesn’t take much of an intuitive leap to see how any such surveillance could have been even more intrusive. Imagine if it was discovered that the prettiest girls in the school were having their photos taken while changing in their bedrooms. Suddenly, it’s not about a school official letting good intentions get ahead of common sense, but something very different indeed. It might not have happened, but the instant the school monitored student behavior at home and chose to get involved, they opened themselves up to such suggestions.

The FBI is now looking into the situation, and the courts are moving to preserve any evidence. The technology to do this has existed for a while, but much as with nuclear weapons, having the ability to use something doesn’t mean you should.

Tape over your web-cameras, folks, and keep your tinfoil hats pointy. You truly have no idea who’s watching.