Well, that will kill the plasma market in California, but as more laptops and LCD tv's are now becoming available with LED backlights, one should ask which plasma manufacturer pissed off the CA Legislature... :)
With the lower power draw of LED TV's, CA's law is a bit like making it illegal for tomorrow to not have a sunrise, too...
Enjoy, CA.... next, they'll make sure you don't watch TV for too many hours per day. Who decides "how many is too many"? Why, the CA Legislature, of course!
Isn't it great to be "taken care of," so well, or as farmers say, "serviced" ?Well, that will kill the plasma market in California, but as more laptops and LCD tv's... more
Health and safety inspectors are to be given unprecedented access to family homes to ensure that parents are protecting their children from household accidents.
New guidance drawn up at the request of the Department of Health urges councils and other public sector bodies to “collect data” on properties where children are thought to be at “greatest risk of unintentional injury”.Health and safety inspectors are to be given unprecedented access to family homes to... more
Major Nidal Hasan, accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood Army base, has been described by former colleagues as "psychotic." As more details emerge about Hasan's troubled state, gun safety advocates are launching fresh attacks on a Senate bill they say would make it easier for mentally unstable veterans to buy firearms.
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) says his "Veterans 2nd Amendment Protection Act" will protect veterans' gun rights. But the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence calls it a "dangerous" proposal that could allow "over 100,000 mentally incapacitated or incompetent persons" to buy guns—people who would previously have been barred from doing so by the Veterans Administration (VA).
(click on the link for the full story and for the in-text links)Major Nidal Hasan, accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood Army base, has been... more
Big Brother 9 winner Adam Jasinski was indicted by a federal grand jury in Boston “on a charge of possession of Oxycodone with intent to distribute,” yesterday (November 4th).
The San Jose Police Department will be the first law enforcement agency in the country to use new ear-mounted video and audio recorders on the job this month, and police say they will provide a new window into arrests and other situations.
The portable AXON cameras, made by Taser International, are expected to be given to 72 San Jose officers in late November or early December, police said. The cameras can record an officer's point of view for up to 10 1/2 hours, and police say the devices will help officers write more accurate reports and aid officers if their actions are called in to question.
A study designed to rank countries in terms of how aggressively they monitor their populatio
ns electronically, has placed the US as 6th and the UK as 5th on a global index.
The two countries lag behind only China, North Korea, Belarus and Russia in terms of governmental surveillance.
52 countries were rated on 17 criteria with regard to how far down the line they are toward a total electronic police state.
"In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every e-mail you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time," the report states.
"Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it – the evidence is already in their database," the report continues. "Perhaps you trust that your ruler will only use his evidence archives to hurt bad people. Will you also trust his successor? Do you also trust all of his subordinates, every government worker and every policeman?"
It is no surprise to see the UK ranking higher than the US, with it's estimated 4.5 million CCTV cameras, it's active DNA database, and given that the British government has openly announced the fact that it wants the authority to monitor and store all phone calls, text messages and emails, a practice already strongly rumoured to be in operation.
Extremely sobering words, we are worse than America for aggressive police tactics etc.
This has gone too far, we are all now guilty until proven innocent, and this isn't for terrorists, it's for people who just may say the wrong thing and step out of line in opposition to the government, our police officers have been brainwashed for years now, same as our Armies, and the only people who suffer will be you and me.
In the photograph above, Red shows the most developed police states, green second, and yellow third.
It seems the Brits are attempting to protect their children from the most influential people in their lives... their parents. With all the closed circuit camera coverage they are still scared of the boogeyman.It seems the Brits are attempting to protect their children from the most influential... more
Atlanta’s other reality show is taping today outside CNN Center, at Woodruff Park and in Midtown.
What you might call Real Pedestrians of Atlanta is a rather modest video surveillance: a few dozen cameras monitoring select locations in the city every second. But the city has applied for millions in federal stimulus funds so it can train about 500 more cameras on city streets.
The city may now engage in a debate that has roiled European capitals for years: Is closed-circuit surveillance a benign tool that helps the cops deter and even solve crimes, or is Big Brother coming to town to observe and record every move you make?
City officials are seeking $13.7 million in federal cash amid a series of high-profile crimes in recent months: a champion boxer shot dead in the street, a City Council member carjacked at gunpoint, a rash of armed robberies near Georgia Tech.
The system Atlanta plans to use could store images for up to 30 days and support software that reads license plate numbers and detects gunshots. Critics say the system conjures up images from George Orwell’s “1984,” a novel about a totalitarian state presided over by an all-seeing Big Brother. They wonder where the cameras will be pointed, who will have access to these images and sounds, how long will they be kept, and where will they be stored.
“It’s kind of creepy,” said Marc Rotenberg executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Mass surveillance is essentially directed toward everyone, so it doesn’t matter if you are someone planning a crime or if you are a resident or tourist or someone who is walking into an office building to go to work. Everyone gets swept into these big databases.”
City police, however, point to the spread of such cameras across the country and around the world. Community improvement districts already operate dozens across downtown and Midtown Atlanta. The city’s application says private and public organizations would be able to tie their cameras into the new network.Atlanta’s other reality show is taping today outside CNN Center, at Woodruff Park... more
Conor Knighton takes a look at the joy of Sabado Gigante as part of his weekly roundup of the week in media. Also Hurricane Rick, The Mo'Nique Show, Tyra Banks making TV history, Sabado Gigante's Miss Ass Contest, and 'Big Brother' legal troubles.
infoMania is a half-hour satirical news show that airs on Current TV. The show puts a comedic spin on the 24-hour chaos and information overload brought about by the constant bombardment of the media. Hosted by Conor Knighton and co-starring Brett Erlich, Sarah Haskins, Ben Hoffman, Bryan Safi and Sergio Cilli, the show airs on Thursdays at 10 pm Eastern and Pacific Times and can be found online at http://current.com/infomania/ or on Current TV. And make sure to check out our facebook profile for special features at http://infomaniafacebook.com.Conor Knighton takes a look at the joy of Sabado Gigante as part of his weekly roundup... more
Tyra brings us the first televised colonic. After getting duped into talking balloon boy, the media can't stop talking about him. TV is haunted by more than a dozen shows about ghosts. Ben gets all dolled up for the Fox Reality Awards. Sergio counts down the hottest hip hop songs on YouTube. And Brett looks at the greatest inventors on the web.
infoMania is a half-hour satirical news show that airs on Current TV. The show puts a comedic spin on the 24-hour chaos and information overload brought about by the constant bombardment of the media. Hosted by Conor Knighton and co-starring Brett Erlich, Sarah Haskins, Ben Hoffman, Bryan Safi and Sergio Cilli, the show airs on Thursdays at 10 pm Eastern and Pacific Times and can be found online at http://current.com/infomania/ or on Current TV. And make sure to check out our facebook profile for special features at http://infomaniafacebook.com.Tyra brings us the first televised colonic. After getting duped into talking balloon... more
One of the reasons why prescription drug abuse pops up frequently in the news is its prevalence amongst celebrities. Just last week we pointed out a story about Burt Reynolds coming clean about his addiction.
Today we found on Huff Po that one of the winners of Big Brother has been busted for trying to sell oxycodone.
"Adam Jasinski, 31, of Delray Beach, Fla., has been charged with attempting to sell 2,000 pills in Massachusetts to a government witness. Federal prosecutors said Jasinski was arrested Saturday after he flew to Boston and showed the witness a sock containing two plastic bags filled with oxycodone, a powerful painkiller that is a popular street drug because of its euphoric effects."
Unsurprisingly, Jasinski had been using the $500K he won on Big Brother to buy pills in South Florida and then re-sell them at a mark-up along the East Coast. As we saw in The Oxycontin Express, this is becoming increasingly popular - whether you're a reality show winner or just a guy from Kentucky.One of the reasons why prescription drug abuse pops up frequently in the news is its... more
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day. http://www.iqt.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.
“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.
Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.
In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.
Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.
The intelligence community has been interested in social media for years. In-Q-Tel has sunk money into companies like Attensity, which recently announced its own web 2.0-monitoring service. The agencies have their own, password-protected blogs and wikis — even a MySpace for spooks.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites. Doug Naquin, the Center’s Director, told an audience of intelligence professionals in October 2007 that “we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs.”
But, “the CIA specifically needs the help of innovative tech firms to keep up with the pace of innovation in social media. Experienced IC [intelligence community] analysts may not be the best at detecting the incessant shift in popularity of social-networking sites. They need help in following young international internet user-herds as they move their allegiance from one site to another,”
Lewis Shepherd, the former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, says in an e-mail. “Facebook says that more than 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S., in more than 180 countries. There are more than 200 non-U.S., non-English-language microblogging Twitter-clone sites today. If the intelligence community ignored that tsunami of real-time information, we’d call them incompetent.” http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm/
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -George OrwellU.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets... more
Big Brother Season 9 winner Adam Jasinski was caught by the DEA with 2,000 oxycodone pills during an attempted drug deal in North Reading, Massachusetts, on Saturday (October 17).Big Brother Season 9 winner Adam Jasinski was caught by the DEA with 2,000 oxycodone... more
A quarter of all workers and volunteers will have every minor conviction they have ever received open to scrutiny by employers following a landmark ruling.
Their criminal records can be held on police computers for as long as officers feel is necessary, after the Court of Appeal judgment.
Details of the offences, no matter how trivial or how long ago, can then be shared with other organisations, including the Criminal Records Bureau, which supplies data to employers vetting job applications.
The decision infuriated civil liberties campaigners. Liberty warned it would mean 'that people will be forever haunted by the minor indiscretions of their youth'.
The ruling came in a test case brought by five people whose minor convictions showed up in records checks after they applied for jobs.
In one case, the complainant had been found guilty of stealing a 99p packet of meat and fined £15 when he was still a child in 1984.
Another case concerned a £25 fine for a theft more than 25 years ago, while a third was over a caution for a minor assault as a child under 14.
The five won a case at an information tribunal, which could have led to up to a million convictions being deleted from police computers.
Overturning the ruling yesterday, Lord Justice Waller said: 'If the police say rationally and reasonably that convictions, however old or minor, have a value in the work they do, that should, in effect, be the end of the matter.'
Details of offences are used for checks on those, such as teachers and carers, who work closely with children or vulnerable adults.
From July, the checks will be expanded to include other jobs including traffic wardens, doctors' receptionists accountants, football stewards and vets. It will cover 11.3million people - one in four working adults.
Well they have every other bit of personal information on us so why not this?A quarter of all workers and volunteers will have every minor conviction they have... more
SEE is a short documentary that presents the growing phenomenon of surveillance through the performance art of Raul Gschrey, a young German artist who is aware of the increasing number of CCTV cameras in his hometown Frankfurt.
The film takes a look at Frankfurt’s streets and public spaces, which are under intensive surveillance, as Raul artistically attempts to communicate with the people who operate the cameras through monitoring systems. He engages in question-and-answer antics to investigate the cameras’ use. Is there anyone watching? Do CCTV cameras provide a feeling of security or are they perceived as an uninvited, intrusive observer?
For Raul, the CCTV camera offers a stage on which people can change roles: from passive observed persons to self-empowered individuals who take active part in an interaction with them. He successfully manages to raise people’s awareness of surveillance, visual monitoring and encourages the public to behave actively and self-consciously using his techniques.
SEE echoes the Orwellian alarm of a despotic regime that continuously monitors its citizens and tries to exercise thought control. This is the nightmare view of the delightfully dastardly tomorrow that, according to many sociologists, has already started.
Produced and Directed by Apostolos Gaitanis
Editing by Chris Tsatsanis
Music by DATURAH
Many thanks to Bernd Metz, Jesse Karjalainen and Miguel Samothrakis
Copyright Apostolos Gaitanis 2009SEE is a short documentary that presents the growing phenomenon of surveillance... more
Independently produced mock Public Servce Announcement on the Patriot Act.
With inauguration of a new president the time is ripe for policy change. Issues such as post-9/11 public privacy are still hot and in need of discussion.Independently produced mock Public Servce Announcement on the Patriot Act.
With... more
An 18-year Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism Manager for the FBI has called for a Special Counsel to be appointed to investigate the allegations of FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. John M. Cole, who now works as an intelligence contractor for the Air Force, made his comments during an audio interview released late last week with radio journalist Peter B. Collins.
He also offered a detailed insider's look at the concerns among high-level officials inside the Bureau as Edmonds' disturbing allegations began coming to light back in 2002, before they would be quashed for seven long years by the Bush Administration's unprecedented use of the so-called "State Secrets Privilege" to gag her.
Earlier last week, following the publication of a remarkable American Conservative magazine cover story interview with Edmonds --- detailing a broad bribery, blackmail, and espionage conspiracy said to have been carried out between current and former members of the U.S. Congress, high-ranking State and Defense Department officials and covert operatives from Turkey and Israel, resulting in the theft and sale of nuclear weapons technology on the foreign black market --- Cole had been quoted by the magazine confirming one of Edmonds' key allegations.
"I am fully aware of the FBI's decade-long investigation of" Marc Grossman, he said in response to the AmCon article/interview. Grossman had served as the third-highest ranking official in the Bush State Department and was alleged by Edmonds in the interview, and in a sworn, video-taped deposition a month earlier, to have been the U.S. ringleader for a massive Turkish espionage scandal reaching through the halls of power and into top-secret nuclear facilities around the country to the benefit of allies and enemies alike. Cole said that the FBI's counterintelligence probe "ultimately was buried and covered up," and that he believes it is "long past time" for an investigation of the case to "bring about accountability."
In his subsequent interview with Collins last week (audio and text excerpts posted below) Cole elaborated on those comments in much greater detail, noting that Edmonds has been "one hundred percent right on the money, on the mark" and confirming the existence of an "ongoing and detailed effort by Turkey to develop influence in the United States" through various illegal activities.
"Yes, I can confirm that," Cole told Collins, "That's true."
The FBI veteran executive also offered an insider's account of the panic that ensued inside the highest echelons of the bureau following Edmonds' first disclosure of information in 2002, recounting how an executive assistant director admitted to him at the time, just after the story first broke, "Well, all I know is that everything that Sibel is stating is true. I read her file. Everything she stated is, in fact, accurate."
Cole further describes how the concerns about Edmonds ultimately led to the Bush Administration's two-time use of the Draconian "State Secrets Privilege" in hopes of keeping her extraordinary information from becoming public. "Everybody at headquarters level at the bureau knew that what she was saying was extremely accurate."
"I know they didn't want her to go out and speak about it at all," Cole revealed, "and I know they were trying to figure out ways of keeping this whole thing quiet, because they didn't want Sibel to come out."
He also offered information which directly counters one of the criticisms of Edmonds' allegations as frequently offered by skeptics. Namely, that as a short time FBI contract translator --- even though she was tasked to review some seven years of counterintelligence wiretaps made from 1996 to 2002 --- she couldn't have had enough understanding of the full scope of the investigations to understand what was really going on.
More...An 18-year Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism Manager for the FBI has called for... more
Endemol’s latest reality show taking 5 lucky travellers on an amazing, adventurous all expenses paid trip of a lifetime to New Zealand.Endemol’s latest reality show taking 5 lucky travellers on an amazing, adventurous... more
