A news service of Freedom Advocates
It was only a matter of time before drones started monitoring signals from mobile devices. Since early February, several small drones flying around the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles have been determining mobile devices’ locations from Wi-Fi and cellular transmission signals. They are part of an experiment by Singapore-based location marketing firm Adnear, which […]
Smartphone users might balk at letting a random app like Candy Crush or Shazam track their every move via GPS. But researchers have found that Android phones reveal information about your location to every app on your device through a different, unlikely data leak: the phone’s power consumption. Researchers at Stanford University and Israel’s defense research […]
John W. Whitehead, Founder, the Rutherford Institute “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984 None of us are perfect. All of us bend the rules occasionally. Even before the age of overcriminalization, when the […]
“…[B]y enabling two-way, real-time communications, smart meters can give customers the information they need to control their own energy use and reduce their electricity cost,” so said Jim Marston, a ‘smart meter’ supporter with the Environmental Defense Fund. [1] [CJF emphasis added] That, obviously, is only one part of the serious issues regarding electromagnetic energy technology […]
A “Seismic Shift” In Assessing Students “The group calls for what’s called “assessment literacy” for teachers, but also administrators, school boards, parents — and students.” (Source) A 3D Research Report by Mari Caplan Many parents, understandably fed up by the aggressive testing associated with Common Core Standards or now Career and College Ready Standards, are […]
As reported earlier, today Obama will unleash his latest executive order, one which will set the stage for “information sharing and analysis organizations” (ISAOs) — or, in political jargon “hubs where companies share cyber threat data with each other and with the Department of Homeland Security.” In regular parlance, what Obama will do is merely […]
FAT CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG: Evidence has now been made public of illegal actions and collusion between former California Public Utilities Commission president Michael Peevey and utility PG&E, as criminal investigations continue. As part of a federal and state investigation into what appears to be systemic corruption involving former senior executives at PG&E […]
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States’ excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to […]
Litigation Seeks to Protect the American Form of Government In a result oriented decision, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evelio Grillo ruled against Freedom Advocates and others in the war over protecting Cities and Counties from a transformation of local government (One Bay Area). The new form of government in the San Francisco Bay Area […]
Following EFF’s victory in a four-year Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the government released an opinion (pdf), written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2010, that concluded that Section 215—the provision of the Patriot Act the NSA relies on to collect millions of Americans’ phone records—does have a limit: census data. The Commerce Department […]
NEW SMART TVS OFFER A WINDOW INTO YOUR LIFE Smart TVs may be getting too smart as some now actually collect and transmit your spoken words, personal information, and sensitive data to other 3rd party sources. In fact Samsung, a major electronic manufacture, admits that they “collect, use, share, and store information through your SmartTV in […]
Brandon Keibler, Founder and Director, Project Digital Privacy Brandon Keibler is just your ordinary 16-year-old from Southern Indiana. At least that’s what some people might think. However, having become an activist at fourteen and helping to establish the Restore the Fourth organization, this young man has just launched an organization to encourage grassroots efforts aimed […]
The “Internet of Things” (IoT) and Smart Grid technologies will together be aggressively integrated into the developed world’s socioeconomic fabric with little-if-any public or governmental oversight. This is the overall opinion of a new report by the Federal Trade Commission, which has announced a series of “recommendations” to major utility companies and transnational corporations heavily […]
Real ID: gold star for good behavior; no report on the scarlet letter they’ll use to ID troublemakers. Real ID: gold star for good behavior; no report on the scarlet letter they’ll use to ID troublemakers. The TSA recently announced they will require a special driver’s license to board domestic flights by 2016. These ‘Real IDs’ […]
from the ah,-now-I-understand-the-phrase-‘documented-citizen’ dept The TSA is disappointed that so few Americans have opted out of its bottle-tossing, package-groping screenings by signing up for its PreCheck program. For a few years now, the TSA has been selling travelers’ civil liberties back to them, most recently for $85 a head, but it’s now making a serious […]
Latest revelation from Snowden archive shows CSE has been monitoring, analyzing, and tracking millions of people who utilize popular file-sharing websites Rapidshare was one of three file-sharing websites targeted in the spy agency’s surveillance. (Photo: Evan Mitsui/CBC) Newly released documents contained in the archive of materials leaked to journalists by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals […]
Increasingly, our freedom and autonomy are threatened by those who seek to monitor and control every aspect of our daily lives. George Orwell’s “Big Brother” from the novel 1984 is a pale threat in comparison to the dystopian reality our leaders which have created for us since that book was published more than six decades […]
We have a problem when it comes to stopping mass surveillance. The entity that’s conducting the most extreme and far-reaching surveillance against most of the world’s communications—the National Security Agency—is bound by United States law. That’s good news for Americans. U.S. law and the Constitution protect American citizens and legal residents from warrantless surveillance. That […]
Update: The government released two new FISC opinions this evening, both of which concern the transition of NSA surveillance to the oversight of the FISC in 2007. Neither of the two documents, available here and here, is the Raw Take order or the 2008 FAA order. The government has one additional production deadline in this […]
The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one’s zip code, income level, smoking status, pregnancy status and more. An example of personal […]
After several years looking at Common Core; where it came from, who supports it, how it is being implemented, its impact on teachers/students/parents, and listening to the complaints of parents/the general public about it, I view Common Core as a symptom, not the cause of the public outcry over education. I believe the reason most […]
Privacy info. This embed will serve content from youtube-nocookie.com Police cars mounted with automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) wind their way through the streets of Oakland like a “Snake” game on an old cell phone. Instead of eating up pixels of food, these cameras gobble down thousands of license plates each day. And instead of […]
The Digital Age has produced some remarkable technology and will continue to do so, but as each new innovation springs forth, more of us are finding that we are not as comfortable with it as we once thought we might be. One of the latest examples comes from a new iPhone app that appears capable of […]
Databanking Everybody Everywhere (Source) From the article above, “Bill Gates: digital learning will revolutionise education in global south”, Cheaper smartphones and tablets, advances in software and better network coverage will revolutionise the way children in developing countries learn over the next 15 years, according to the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.… “The educational software is […]
Sustainable Development is the blueprint being used across America and around the world to implement the United Nations Agenda 21 Programme.
