Video - Facebook claims ‘a bug’ made it track nonusers, Anyone interested in a bridge for sale?

Facebook faces class action law suit for violating privacy by amassing users facial recognition data.

Facebook faces class action law suit for violating privacy by amassing users facial recognition data. (TW).

Facebook faces class action law suit for violating the privacy of its users by collecting their facial data and storing it.

Facebook is being accused of violating the privacy of its users by collecting their facial data, according to a class-action lawsuit filed last week. Facebook has been allegedly collecting facial recognition data from millions of FB users and creating “the largest privately held stash of biometric face-recognition data in the world,” according to Courthouse News Service.

The class action lawsuit filed by Carlo Licata and associates alleges that this facial recognition program violates the privacy of its users. The plaintiffs have cited an Illinois law called the Illinois Biometrics Information Privacy Acts, which requires companies to get written content from a user if it is collecting biometric data. Further, according to the Illinois law, such company must state the purpose and length of its data collection program.

The plaintiffs claims that Facebook’s biometric program shows “brazen disregard for its users’ privacy writes.” They have also argued that even by changing user settings, the FB users can't escape the facial recognition collection program, reports the Chicago Tribune. Hmmmm......Reason xxxx why i don't go to facebook......Read the full story here.

"We are far closer to the tyrannical model than we are the free model" Greenwald.

"We are far closer to the tyrannical model than we are the free model" Greenwald. (sltrib).

The 48-year-old, who worked to publish the documents leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden, spoke for about 40 minutes and took questions for 20 minutes more about privacy and Snowden.

Greenwald said the most shocking thing he's found in the tens of thousands of NSA documents published so far has been the NSA's motto: Collect it all.

"It's not, like, 'Collect a lot of it,' or even, like, 'Collect all the terrorist communications,' " Greenwald said. "It's like saying the goal of the NSA is to eliminate all private communications."

He contended this impedes Americans' freedom: If people are being monitored, they aren't as creative and don't think as freely.

Also, the decisions to collect the data and store it was done with no public discussion. Greenwald said that in free societies, government officials have an expectation of transparency and citizens have an expectation of privacy.

Tyrannical societies have an opposite system. "I would submit, and I don't think that it's in dispute, that we are far closer to the tyrannical model than we are the free model," Greenwald said.

Greenwald also discussed the NSA's Utah Data Center, located in Bluffdale. He pointed to NSA documents from 2009 and 2010 saying the agency had a problem storing all the data it was collecting. The Utah Data Center helps solve that problem, Greenwald said.

In a meeting with reporters before his speech, Greenwald said the data center has an "ominous role in the surveillance state."

"The better [the government's] capacity for storage, and the more space they have to do it the longer they can keep the data," Greenwald said. Read the full story here.

'Yes We Can' - Facebook Wants to ‘Listen’ to Your Music and TV.

'Yes We Can' - Facebook Wants to ‘Listen’ to Your Music and TV.(BBC).

Facebook is to release a new feature on its mobile app that “listens” to your music and TV shows.

If the song or show is recognised by the app, users can publish the information on their profile or to selected friends.

The service hopes to take advantage of the “second screen” trend, which sees fans of TV shows in particular sharing their experiences on social networks.

However, some users have privacy concerns.

The feature, which will be available in a few weeks’ time, uses the microphones inside users’ smartphones to detect nearby music or TV shows.

As the user begins writing a status update, a small animated icon will appear at the top of the app.

If the app detects the appropriate audio signals and finds a match from its database, the user can then share what he or she is watching or listening to.

Facebook says the feature can be turned off at any time, the audio recording is not stored anywhere and the device cannot identify background noise or conversations.


“If you share music, your friends can see a 30-second preview of the song. For TV shows, the story in News Feed will highlight the specific season and episode you’re watching,” Facebook said in a statement.

'Welcome to Turkey...Iranian Style' - Turkish draft bill to allow limitation of and surveillance in Internet.

'Welcome to Turkey...Iranian Style' - Turkish draft bill to allow limitation of and surveillance in Internet.(HD).

A draft bill will permit authorities to limit access to the Internet and monitor all actions by individuals online and keep such records for two years, daily Hürriyet has reported.

Three articles about Internet usage were concealed within a longer draft bill on the Family and Social Policy Ministry’s organizational structure and responsibilities, Yalçın Doğan, a columnist from daily Hürriyet, revealed yesterday.

The draft law will permit officials to limit keywords more easily, meaning access to videos on video-sharing websites such as YouTube that include keywords deemed problematic by Turkish authorities will be blocked.

All individuals’ Internet records, including details about what sites they have visited, which words they have searched for on the web and what activity they have engaged in on social networking websites, will be kept for one or two years, according to the draft law.

Web providers will also be forced to become members of a new Internet union to be formed under the control of government, Doğan wrote.

The draft bill is designed to “protect the family, children and youth from items on the Internet that encourage drug addiction, sexual abuse and suicide,” according to daily Hürriyet.

Responding to a question on the matter, ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) spokesperson Hüseyin Çelik said Turkey would never become like China, which is famous for its Internet censorship.

“Turkey is not China and will never be like China in this manner. Aren’t we all in consensus on having some laws about social media and Internet media? There can be regulations based on world standards anywhere in the world,” said Çelik.

Hmmm......Erdogan: "Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want."

Video - Teargas Forbidden on the battlefield, yet perfectly legal to 'Shut Up' the civilian population.

Video - Teargas Forbidden on the battlefield, yet perfectly legal to 'Shut Up' the civilian population. HT: RussiaToday.From indebted Greece to rioting Turkey, European governments’ eager response to protests is tear gas. Critics say this answer is the complete opposite of dialogue and freedom and clear evidence that something is sour in European democracies.

Forbidden on the battlefield, yet perfectly legal for use against civilian population, tear gas has become an all too familiar sight on news reports lately, says RT’s Polly Boyko.

But the irritating agents and the way they empower governments to deal summarily with public disobedience raise many considerations. Those vary from practical health risk that the supposedly non-lethal weapons pose towards vulnerable people to the more fundamental question of whether tear gas makes governments more detached from their populations and prone to suppression of civil freedoms.

“Tear gas was invented in part to shut people up. This is where communication meets politics. We’re talking about a technology, a weapon that actually inhibits people from being able to speak,” Anna Feigenbaum, Lecturer in Politics and Media Studies at Bournemouth University argued in an interview with RT.

Video - "University thought police."

A Carleton student group had their free speech wall destroyed. Brian hears from the group’s president on why they put up the wall in the first place.HT: SunNewsNetwork

Video - "Tearing down free speech"

Ezra Levant debates free speech hater and 7th year Carleton human rights major Arun Smith.HT: Sun News Network

Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email.

Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email.(AG).By Noel Brinkerhoff.The federal government will continue to access Americans’ emails without a warrant, after the U.S. Senate dropped a key amendment to legislation now headed to the White House for approval.
Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved an amendment attached to the Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act (which deals with publishing users’ Netflix information on Facebook pages) that would have required federal law enforcement to obtain a warrant before monitoring email or other data stored remotely (i.e., the cloud).
The Senate was set to approve the video privacy bill along with the email amendment, which would have applied to a different law, the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. But then senators decided for reasons unknown to drop the amendment.
Currently, the government can collect emails and other cloud data without a warrant as long as the content has been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more. Federal agents need only demonstrate that they have “reasonable grounds to believe” the information would be useful in an investigation.Read the full story here.

St. Lucie County, Florida also in Allen West's district Had 141.1% Turnout; Obama Won County

St. Lucie County, Florida also in Allen West's district Had 141.1% Turnout; Obama Won County.(PP).Out of 175,554 registered voters, 247,713 vote cards were cast in St. Lucie County, Florida on Tuesday. Barack Obama won the county.
When faced with the astronomical figures, Gertrude Walker, Supervisor of Elections for St. Lucie County, said she had no idea why turnout was so incredibly high. She was flabbergasted, saying, "We've never seen that here."

Coincidentally (or not), St. Lucie County is also in Allen West's district, where 6,000 votes mysteriously "shifted" from Mr. West to his challenger. Out of the 247,713 cards cast, somehow election machines counted 123,591 total votes.
Along with this questionable result, Mr. Obama also received over 99% of the vote in numerous districts in Broward County. In various districts in Cleveland, he received 100% of the vote. In Florida, Mr. Obama received over 99% of the vote in precincts where GOP inspectors had been removed.
As for the Presidential race, there's no connection between Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, right?Read the full story here.

Video - Pat Caddell: "The mainstream media has become an enemy of the people."

North Korea camps 'house the desperate, not dissidents'.

North Korea camps 'house the desperate, not dissidents'.(AFP).SEOUL — A new report on North Korea's notorious political prison camps shows that many of those jailed in recent decades were desperate people seeking food or work overseas rather than dissidents. Other offences were even more trivial, it says: one female former student was serving a term for having a western-style dance with a foreigner, another student was incarcerated for singing a South Korean song. An entire family was thrown into a camp after the father forgot to refer to the state's late founder Kim Il-Sung as "Great Leader" during an ideological session.
The report by the South's National Human Rights Commission, a state-appointed body, is its most detailed investigation of human rights abuses in the communist state. Officials provided extracts to AFP this week before its upcoming release. "It details the horrific situation of inmates," a commission official said. The report is based on interviews with 834 refugees, including those once held in the six camps, which rights groups say house a total of around 200,000 "political" prisoners. It lists the names of 278 people in the camps between the mid-1990s and 2005 and information on their offences. "We hope this report will have the effect of checking and preventing human rights abuses in North Korea," Lee Yong-Ken, head of the commission's North Korea human rights team, told AFP. Among the 278, about 60 prisoners -- the largest single category -- were being punished for fleeing the impoverished country in search of food and work abroad or for trying to escape to South Korea. Twenty-seven of the inmates were ethnic Koreans who had settled in the North after moving from Japan. Five people were imprisoned for Christian worship while 29 were "guilty by association" -- serving time because of alleged offences committed by family members. About 30 were jailed for making critical comments about the regime, "defaming the dignity" of leaders, praising capitalism, disclosing state secrets or engaging in corruption. Others were held on espionage charges or for their political beliefs. According to a media report this week, the list includes one high-profile victim -- Sim Chol-Ho, a former vice minister of posts and telecommunications who was sent to the Yodok camp in 2001 for criticising intelligence authorities. Sim was released 18 months later and in February this year was named a minister, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily citing the commission report. It quoted a defector as saying Sim received about 200 grams (seven ounces) of corn powder every day in Yodok and was forced to eat grilled rats to survive. 
Last month a group called the International Coalition to Stop Crimes against Humanity in North Korea estimated that 400,000 inmates of the camps have died in the past few decades from starvation, overwork or execution. The South Korean report quotes one woman as saying 3,721 inmates died from January to June in 2005 at the Jeungsan prison in South Pyongan province. The South's rights watchdog under previous administrations took a low-key approach on its neighbour's human rights record to avoid jeopardising an aid and engagement policy towards Pyongyang. But conservative President Lee Myung-Bak, who took office in early 2008 and abandoned the policy, has said he would not shy away from raising the subject.Read the full story here.