JUST BLAME THE BACK GUY

OMG LOOK! THE NSA SPIED UNDER BUSH

When Republicans win, they create spy programs. When they lose, they complain about them:

Spying on Citizens is something that happens in our world, whether it be the NSA, Facebook or Google. It happens, its a unfortunate sign of a world where terror exists.

We are spied on daily by Facebook, how in the hell do you think those ads on the right side of your news feed page pop up with things you "like" and websites you've visited?

Go ahead, click over to your Facebook window that you currently have open. How does Facebook know you like Taco Bell enough to give you six ads for the new Cheezy Beefy Explosion Burrito every day? Why do you think you get random spam texts from get-rich-quick schemes on your cell phone? In fact, take the thinking one step further — Verizon (and every other cell phone company) has been selling your personal information a lot longer than the NSA has been gathering it.

We accept spying and prying into our personal lives more than we care to admit; every phone has GPS capabilities that could make tracking us down as easy as logging into a website and clicking a button. Anyone hyperventilating over this is being completely disingenuous?

My problem with this spying, is not the spying, its the sanctimonious American Taliban -er - once again suffering from "Bushnesia". Where was all this righteous fury and indignation when the Patriot Act was being drafted? When G.W. Bush's administration was creating the Department of Homeland Security? If information privacy is such a concern, why not get upset over the profiteering of our privacy as opposed to the government? Corporations have vast data warehouses - data mining your information just as much, if no more so than the NSA. How do you think it’s possible for Target to spit out coupons for diapers and formula every time a young couple goes shopping for the essentials there?

We live in the most technologically advanced era of our species’ existence. Data therefore is valuable more than perhaps anything else. Data is information, and information is power. Within the last few years, this data mining program was used to stop terrorists attack in these United States.

We live in a world where McDonald's, Walmart, Pizza Hut and WAWA gather as much personal data on you as the NSA - just so they can maximize their profit margins. Should we really be that upset when our own government is found to be behaving in the same way? - where the only difference is - the Government is protecting you from death, not selling you the sandwich of the week.

Like Benghazi, like the IRS, and now the NSA, all of these happened on G.W. Bush's watch with nary a peep, bitch or moan. If you going to hate you some U.S. Government, at least be f*cking consistent with your hating!

NFTOS

Editor-In-Chief

Roger West

VERIZON SPYGATE, JUST THE FACTS

NSA'S DATA MINING PROGRAM

BREAKING UPDATE 6/7/13 12:56

The group called "Anonymous" leaks NSA Documents.

Maybe, just maybe. if House Republicans had voted to repeal the PATRIOT Act 37 times. Then the NSA looking at your phone records would not be an issue.

Hot off the heels of the revelation that Verizon has been supplying the National Security Agency (NSA) with phone records for all domestic calls, the Washington Post reveals the NSA and FBI are data mining the servers of nine technology companies, “extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”

Companies participating in the program are obliged to accept “a directive” from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit. In exchange, the companies receive immunity from lawsuits.

The broad, top secret program, code-named PRISM, was established in 2007 with Microsoft as its first partner but now counts Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple among its membership. Twitter is notably absent from the list.

PRISM appears to closely resemble the warrant-less surveillance orders issues by President Bush after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks rather than a dragnet data collection operation, but the NSA has the capability to search through the company’s servers for whatever it likes. To collect data, analysts in Fort Meade key in search terms designed to produce an “at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s ‘foreignness.’”

But even when meeting that relatively low threshold, by its very nature the system likely collects information about Americans who have had communications with the target, and analysts are trained to chain through two degrees of separation of contacts from the initial target. This chaining means that many Americans are likely the subject of “incidental” surveillance.

Analysts have access to Facebook’s “extensive search and surveillance capabilities” while the Skype partnership allows for monitoring of any combination of “audio, video, chat, and file transfers”, and Google allows surveillance of “Gmail, voice and video chat, photo libraries, and live surveillance of search terms.” The career intelligence officer who leaked documents about the program to the Washington Post noted “they quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”

Apple and Facebook have both denied participation in the program, with Apple saying they've “never heard” of it, and Facebook flatly denying they provide “any government organization with direct access” to their servers. Google has been slightly less clear, but told Washington Post they lack a back door for the government to obtain access to private user data and care “deeply” about the privacy of users.

An internal presentation on the operation obtained by the Post claims PRISM is the most frequent contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, saying it was cited in 1,477 articles last year and accounts for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports within the NSA. A parallel initiative also revealed by the Post, codenamed BLARNEY, is an ongoing data collection program that gathers “metadata” such as address packets and device signatures as it streams past choke points in internet infrastructure.

Additionally, since the writing of this blog:

Amie Stepanovich, Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Domestic Surveillance Project noted that the 51 percent threshold reportedly used by NSA analysts not only “leaves a lot of room for error” initially, but combined with the chaining effect and how studies of private data brokers have shown that innate qualities like “foreignness” are often quite difficult to determine, the chance of an American citizens’ data being incidentally caught up in the program could actually be “incredibly high.”

The Washington Post has now backtracked on their claims that government had direct access to servers, editing their report to include more responses from companies and this statement: “it is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing ‘collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,’ rather than directly to company servers.” This change only strengthens the argument that the NSA had access to copies of the data.

The National Security Agency and the FBI don't bear all the responsibility for the revelation that Verizon is turning phone records over to the government. That responsibility lies with the members of Congress who voted for the PATRIOT Act, as well as extensions of it and the provisions related to collecting those records. Over 100 people currently serving in the House and Senate voted for the original Act in 2001. Last year, over 300 voted to extend a key provision.

The problem with all this is again, this is a by-product of G.W. Bush regime. Where was the anger in 2001 [and 2011] when congress passed this and Bush signed into law? Who's to blame ?

At the end of the day, in this time of terror, this is a necessary evil. I personally do not feel violated that my phone numbers are monitored - what should be more irritating is that Facebook, Google and others monitor your activities much more than NSA, where is the outcry over this?

This is the sign of the times - of a post 9/11 country, while you may find it intrusive, I find it acceptable, for the failure not to monitor, is just another invitation to another horrible terrorist act on this great land.


NFTOS
Editor-In-Chief
Roger West

Be careful What You "Like" On Facebook

It could cost you your job.

Daniel Ray Carter and Robert McCoy were deputies in the Hampton, Virginia sheriff’s office. Were, that is, until they made the mistake of “liking” their boss’ opponent’s Facebook page during a contested sheriff election. They were both fired shortly after their boss won reelection.

As government employees, Carter and McCoy are protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, a federal judge in Virginia denied their claim that they were unconstitutionally fired for expressing their political view on the unusual theory that “liking” a Facebook page does not constitute a form of expression protected by the First Amendment:

It is the Court’s conclusion that merely “liking” a Facebook page is insufficient to merit constitutional protection. In cases where courts have found that constitutional speech protections extended to Facebook posts, actual statements existed within the record. . . . These illustrative cases differ markedly from the case at hand in one crucial way: Both [precedents] involved actual statements. No such statements exist in this case. Simply liking a Facebook page is insufficient. It is not the kind of substantive statement that has previously warranted constitutional protection. The Court will not attempt to infer the actual content of Carter’s posts from one click of a button on Adams’ Facebook page. For the Court to assume that the Plaintiffs made some specific statement without evidence of such statements is improper. Facebook posts can be considered matters of public concern; however, the Court does not believe Plaintiffs Carter and McCoy have alleged sufficient speech to garner First Amendment protection.

As Eugene Volokh points out, this is not correct. The First Amendment does not simply shield “actual statements,” it shields a long list of expressive activity, including “saluting a flag (and refusing to do so), wearing an armband to protest a war, displaying a red flag, and even ‘marching, walking or parading’ in uniforms displaying the swastika.” If passively wearing a black armband speaks clearly enough to convey a First Amendment protected message, than surely clicking a button that indicates approval of a political candidate or his message speaks just as clearly.

Indeed, it’s difficult to find any meaningful distinction between Carter and McCoy’s actions here and any number of activities protected by the First Amendment beyond the fact that they used a new method of communication to convey their message. But this cannot be a constitutionally relevant distinction. The First Amendment didn’t stop functioning with the invention of the telephone, the instant message, the text message or the email. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t apply to social media.

Additionally, there is always something perverse about court decisions which prevent career employees from speaking out about how their boss is doing their job. Few people are better suited to judge the current sheriff than his deputies, and they should not be discouraged from sharing their views with the public.

First amendment or not Virginia is a right to work State, and if you have read this blog before, right to work equals you have no rights.



NFTOS
Staff Writer
Steve "Damn Nazi Liberal" Chevapravatdumrong

YOU WANT MY WHAT?

Employer Wants Your Facebool Password?

Want a Job? Employers Want Your Facebook Password First.

Maybe Facebook doesn’t have your most private secrets but your private information and password are pretty private. Lately, some employers and recruiters have started asking job applicants for their Facebook usernames and passwords as part of the interviewing process.

Facebook has become public domain and if you leave your privacy settings open, recruiters and your future bosses can look through your profile to get a better feel for you. This is even more true if you friend them. They feel that people share more with their virtual networks than they do with their real life family and friends and by snooping around, they will get a better feel for you. Where I would draw the line is when a recruiter or potential boss asks for your username and password so that they can snoop around. NEVER FREIND YOUR BOSS period!

YES, this is happening and No, you should not give up your password. 

First of all, it is against the Facebook Terms of Service to give anyone your password so if a company is asking you to do that, it’s probably not a place that you want to be working in the first place. Apparently it is legal to ask an interviewee to log in for your and shoulder surf while you scroll through your “friends only” posts. Besides the legalities, a recruiter or potential boss has no right to request access to any information that is “private”. If they are worried about how you will represent the company, which is a valid concern, they can look through your public profile and see what everyone else in the world sees. They can also get references from your past boss, co-workers, friends, neighbors and old professors. They already do criminal checks at many companies but once again, this is all public information. If you start getting into private information, they will want to look around your house, have access to your previous browsing history and private files on your personal computer. They’ll want to hook you up to a polygraph and interrogate you on your deepest secrets.


WAVY 10 ON EMPLOYERS WANTING FACEBOOK PASSWORDS

Local lawyer discusses Facebook privacy: wavy.com

From the recruiter’s perspective, they are trying to make sure that you will not only fit in with the company but that you will also represent the company. Although you won’t be on the clock 24/7, you will be in some ways representing the company at all times in one form or another. If you do something stupid that gets you on the news, in jail or both, the company that you work for can be mentioned. That said, there is always a risk in hiring anyone but public is public and private is private and that line should not be crossed.

As a job applicant or an employee, you always have to be careful about what you post in your public timeline or even your private timeline that is open to friends of friends (or friends if you choose to connect with your boss or recruiter). There have been many cases of people who lost their jobs, got denied insurance claims or got passed over for jobs because of their Facebook activity. There have also been people who have been helped by their obsession of posting everything to their profile such as Rodney Bradford, who got off of a crime because he updated his status while the crime in question was taking place.

To sum it up, if the recruiter or potential boss asks you for your private information, it’s probably not the job of your dreams anyway. Its a ballsy move by the employer to ask for this information, and personally I wouldn't allow them to view it!

Thankfully, Facebook issued an announcement that employers should not ask for passwords.





RELATED:
Employers want your Facebook password

Facebook Doesn't Want Employers Asking For Users' Passwords



NFTOS
Editor-In-Chief
Roger West