Thursday, October 31, 2013

Fox Lawyers Doorstep Alleged Simpsons Pirate With $10.5m Lawsuit

  • October 31, 2013
After a long-running dispute with Twentieth Century Fox and the MPAA, the alleged former operator of a site dedicated to linking to episodes of The Simpsons now faces punishing legal action. Early October, lawyers from Fox turned up at the man’s home in Canada, taking away all of his electronic equipment and handing over documents detailing a $10.5 million lawsuit.
fox-tvWhile anti-piracy actions take place all around the world on a daily basis, it is relatively rare to hear of targeted lawsuits against individual sites. But as the MPAA case against isoHunt closes, another large one is developing in its wake.
The story centers around two recently closed sites. The first is Watch The Simpsons Online, a site that had been around since 2008. The second, Watch Family Guy Online, had been online since 2009.
As their names suggest, the sites gave Internet users the opportunity to watch Fox TV shows The Simpsons and Family Guy online. This was achieved via embedded web players utilizing external video sources.
The sites did fairly well, with the later achieving around seven million visitors and the former around 80 million during their lifetimes. Due to unwanted attention from Fox, both had to employ domain switches to stay online, something which no doubt affected their traffic.
The first sign that Fox were sizing up Watch The Simpsons Online (WTSO) came in 2008. Sources inform TorrentFreak that Fox were “shutting the site down almost weekly” by threatening its hosts.
The domain being used at the time – WatchTheSimpsonsOnline.com – was eventually seized by Fox after the company won an uncontested WIPO dispute. As can be seen in the image below, it is now listed as belonging to Fox’s IP department.
WTSO
WTSO returned under a new domain but in 2010 the MPAA sent a cease and desist, including a complaint for WFGO (Watch Family Guy Online) for good measure. The site admin complied and later transferred the domain to a new owner, who some time later appears to have transferred it back.
Fox, however, had certainly not forgotten about the sites.
Records show that on October 2, 2013, Fox paid $50 to file a copyright infringement complaint at the Federal Court in Toronto, Canada. On the same day requests were filed to keep court documents “confidential” pending the issuing of a court order.
On October 8, a so-called “Anton Piller” order was granted by a judge in the Federal Court. This order grants entities the right to carry out searches and seize evidence without prior warning with the aim of preventing evidence destruction. They are often used in copyright and trademark disputes.
Order in hand, Fox wasted no time. On October 9, two lawyers from Fox, two court appointed lawyers, two IT professionals and a forensics specialist turned up at an address in Canada looking for the alleged admin of WTSO. After gaining access to the property with the full permission of the court, they seized all of the defendant’s electronic devices and other related items.
The punchline was the handing over of a $10.5 million lawsuit alongside orders not to meddle with the sites.
Simpsons
The seized devices were returned within 72 hours, presumably having been cloned, but it soon became clear the matter would press on.
The alleged admin of the site was given an opportunity to settle the case for a cool $1 million, an “impossible amount” according to our sources. Despite the lack of a formal agreement, both Watch The Simpsons Online and Watch Family Guy Online were taken down and now display links to Hulu and Fox.com.
WTSO
Nevertheless, the legal proceedings continued. On October 16 a review took place in the Federal Court which established that the Anton Piller order had been properly granted and executed. A date of October 22 was set for a court appearance by the defendant, but the hearing took place with no defendant present after he failed to appear.
Sources close to the case inform TorrentFreak that the likely outcome will be a $10m+ default judgment in favor of Fox, to be boosted by more than $600,000 to cover legal costs. We shouldn’t have to wait long to discover the full details.

NSA Used FBI Abuses To Justify Metadata Collection

from the another-bad-argument,-'bolstered'-by-worse-tactics dept

James Clapper's office has released another batch of documents in a grudging nod to the transparency forced on it by the ACLU's FOIA requests (and subsequent lawsuit). Mike covered one yesterday that detailed the NSA's collection of location data, something it had previously assured legislators hadn't actually happened. Well, it did happen but the agency excused it as a "test," something it felt the FISA bulk records orders allowed it to do. Tellingly, it informed officials after the fact, rather than seeking explicit approval beforehand.

Beyond that, these documents are rather light on details. If I were in Clapper's position, these are the sorts of documents I'd release -- ones that nod toward openness but provide as little information as possible. Most of what's been released is memos issued to intelligence committees stating that the NSA has fixed its problems (the end-to-end reviews) and is behaving itself. The memos also indicate that the NSA has a very bad habit of doing things first and seeking permission or forgiveness later -- "playing to the edges of the box," as it were.

That's not to say there's nothing useful, informative or revealing in this release, but what is there is very limited, and a handful of the memos are redundant. All in all, it's a very safe document release.

One of the more interesting bits appears in a joint statement issued in October, 2009 by the National Counterterrorism Center and the NSA in support of the PATRIOT Act reauthorization.

While defending the Section 215 collections, the following points are listed as evidence of the program's worthiness.
FBI representatives have indicated to NSA that the telephone contact reporting has provided leads and linkages to individuals in the United States with potential ties to terrorism who may not have otherwise been known to or identified by the FBI. In Calendar Year 2008, telephone numbers tipped from the NSA business records results either added value or led to:
  • the opening of over 240 Threat Assessments
  • the opening of over 100 Preliminary Investigations
  • the opening of approximately 15 Full Investigations
  • 180 National Security Letters issued.
That both the NSA and FBI actually believe "threat assessments" and NSLs hold any worth indicates there's been a little too much Kool-Aid in the interdepartmental water cooler, to say nothing about the fact that 100 "preliminary investigations" resulted in only 15 "full investigations."

The ACLU's rundown of the FBI's abuse of its powers had this to say about the uselessness of "threat assessments."
In 2008, the US Attorney General granted the FBI permission to utilize investigations called "assessments" which required no predicate and granted the agency power to conduct these as though they were actual investigations and use all the tools normally available. The FBI was only too happy to take the AG up on his offer.

In a two-year period from 2009 to 2011, the FBI opened over 82,000 “assessments” of individuals or organizations, less than 3,500 of which discovered information justifying further investigation.
To credit the NSA with "tipping" leads that resulted in "assessments" is hardly an indicator of the program's usefulness. The FBI's enthusiasm for exploiting this "tool" is well documented. Handing the FBI a few random pages from the nearest phonebook would likely have resulted in the same number of "assessments" over that same time period.

The FBI has a fondness for National Security Letters as well. These allow agents to bypass legal safeguards when seeking info -- little things like warrants, subpoenas and court orders. The FBI's abuse of NSLs is also well-documented.
A 2007 Inspector General audit revealed that from 2003 through 2005 the FBI issued over 140,000 National Security Letters —secret demands for certain account information from telecommunications companies, financial institutions, and credit agencies that require no judicial approval — almost half of which targeted Americans.

The FBI's abuse of the NSLs goes even further than the fact that the agency nearly continuously wrote itself blank surveillance checks for three straight years. The ACLU notes that the agency so thoroughly abused the program that it truly had no idea how many letters had been issued. An audit of the program also found that 60% of the audited files had no supporting documentation and that 22% contained at least one unreported legal violation.
And when the agency's NSL abuse came under fire, it switched to exigent circumstance letters, Post-It notes or showing up at the telco offices and reading search results over employees' shoulders.

The NSA using these horrendously abused processes as "proof" of the bulk records collection's worth is just as ridiculous as someone pointing to overflowing prisons as proof minimum sentencing standards are an effective deterrent of criminal activity.

The paper also makes the claim that having these records would have prevented the 9/11 attacks which, if nothing else, gives some idea how long that particular (bad) argument has been in play. It points to the fact that it couldn't collect domestic phone data at that point as the essential missing element, while omitting any mention of the CIA's failure to put Khalid al-Mihdhar on a watch list, which allowed him to return to the US unnoticed after he fell off the agency's radar during a visit to the Middle East.

In all likelihood, this "essential element" would have been just another dot for the NSA to connect. Whether or not it would have made the connection in time to prevent the attack is open to speculation. NSA heads and its defenders believe it would have, but there's been no evidence produced so far that would indicate the 215 programs do anything more than create another set of dots.

The key element would have been preventing al-Mihdhar from boarding that plane on 9/11. If the CIA had placed him on a watch list after it lost track of him, this could very well have been prevented as any attempts to travel would have triggered a response from security and intelligence agencies.

Finally, there's this bizarre redaction, which directly follows discussion of the tracking and arrest of a suspected al-Qaeda member.


Given the context, this missing word can't be anything other than al-Qaeda ("continues their aspirations and attempts to achieve another spectacular attack in the United States..."). There's that over-classification and opacity at work again, redacting a word that can be inferred by context and which would come as no surprise to any al-Qaeda members who might be viewing the DNI's recently released documents.http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131030/08215225065/nsa-used-fbi-abuses-to-justify-metadata-collection.shtml

Feinstein Releases Fake NSA Reform Bill, Actually Tries To Legalize Illegal NSA Bulk Data Collection

from the don't-buy-the-lies dept

Despite Dianne Feinstein's supposed "conversion" earlier this week about the NSA being out of control with its spying, and the associated performance of NSA folks claiming that they were screwed, it's quickly become apparent that this was all pure theater to make people think that real reform might be coming. Feinstein claimed she was shocked about this and called for a full investigation... and yet, just two days later, she held a markup of her planned "reform" bill for the collection of intelligence by the NSA (and held the markup in secret -- because nothing says "let's increase transparency of the NSA" like keeping the debates and votes secret). That bill was moved out of committee today by a vote of 11 to 4, leading Feinstein to release the bill with a bunch of misleading claptrap designed to make people think it's real reform. It even confused some folks who know this stuff into thinking, after a quick first pass, that it "banned" the bulk data collection. And you might think that's the case because her description says:
  • Prohibits the collection of bulk communication records under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act except under specific procedures and restrictions set forth in the bill;
  • Establishes criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison for intentional unauthorized access to data acquired under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the United States;
  • Prohibits the bulk collection of the content of communications under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act;
Reading that, you might think it actually banned the bulk data collection that's been reported on, but it does not. That "except under specific procedures and restrictions set forth in the bill" just takes the highly questionable reasoning of the FISA Court in approving the bulk data collection and makes that the "exception." In other words, it does exactly the opposite of what Feinstein claims. Rather than banning bulk data collection, it legalizes it. That third point on the "content" is just a red herring -- the same red herring that Feinstein and others have been waving about wildly for months, pretending people are upset about the collection of actual recordings, rather than the collection of metadata. She's wrong. People are upset about the collection of metadata, which this legalizes.

Even more ridiculous, the focus (both in the marketing and the bill itself) on collection of content "under Section 215" is another red herring, since it appears that much of that collection actually happens under other programs anyway. So this doesn't change a damn thing.

Other supposed "changes" in the bill -- including limiting who can perform queries on the data, how many "hops" they can analyze and how long they can retain the data, all match with current practice and don't change a thing. Even though James Clapper and Keith Alexander more or less seemed to concede at yesterday's House hearing that they'd be okay with cutting back on the data retention from five to three years, this bill keeps it at five. There are a few other minor changes, but this bill is almost entirely as expected, simply codifying the status quo, even though Feinstein has insisted that it was legal all along. The one minor "concession" which many had expected -- having a third party at the FISA Court who could fight for civil liberties -- is watered down. Rather than an actual adversarial setup, with this person representing civil liberties, it's set up as an appointed "amicus cureia" or "friend of the court," where they basically just advise the court on the issue.

This bill is a farce, and made even more farcical by the misleading way in which Feinstein has presented it, pretending it bans bulk data collection when it actually legalizes it.http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131031/12394625090/feinstein-releases-fake-nsa-reform-bill-actually-tries-to-legalize-illegal-nsa-bulk-data-collection.shtml

Rep. Mike Rogers Angrily Defends Bathroom Spycam

from the as-long-as-they-don't-know-about-it dept

Ken White blogs at Popehat. He's a litigator and criminal defense attorney at Brown White & Newhouse LLP in Los Angeles. His views are his alone, not those of his firm. This post is cross-posted from Popehat with permission.

And, because we here at Techdirt have had issues with Mike Rogers' office in the past, we hope that they have a dictionary and a copy of the Constitution -- though, given the comments that inspired this post, it seems like he might need a remedial refresher course.


Dateline: Washington, D.C.: Representative Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) was defiant today in the face of accusations that he had installed a small digital camera in the women's bathroom in his office at the Capitol.
"This is just politics," said the ten-term Congressman. "I would argue the fact that we haven't had any women come forward with any specificity arguing that their privacy has been violated, clearly indicates, in ten years, clearly indicates that something must be doing right. Somebody must be doing something exactly right."
When reporters asked how women would know to complain — the spycam, funded by the government, was expertly hidden — Rogers asserted that was the point. "You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated," said Rogers.
Rogers went on to explain that the nation's Capitol — which has housed figures like former Congressman Bob Filner and former Senator Bob Packwood — presents known dangers to women, and that the spycam is calculated to make certain they are protected from those dangers. "If the women knew exactly what that spycam was about, they would be applauding and popping champagne corks. It's a good thing. it keeps the women safe. It keeps the Capitol safe," Rogers asserted.
Rogers then abruptly concluded the interview, threatening to sue reporters if they wrote about it.

Obamacare LIES, Economic COLLAPSE & the Fukushima NIGHTMARE

SGT Report -

Obamacare LIES, Economic COLLAPSE & the Fukushima NIGHTMARE - MUST LISTEN http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j9Az3nkK6Y

Do you know that 1 out of every 4 Americans has a job that pays $10 per hour or less? Do you know that today 47 MILLION Americans are on food stamps?  That’s up 50% from the day Obama took office. Do you realize that Obamacare is a Trojan horse designed to wreck the US economy? Do you realize that something is killing sea life all over the Pacific Ocean? Do you know 300 tons of highly radioactive water is being dumped into the Ocean each day? Do you care that the U.S. military is being taught to treat Christians as “extremists” and “potential terrorists”?  These ARE the signs of the collapse, and sadly this is just the tip of the iceberg. Michael Snyder from the Economic Collapse Blog joins me to discuss.

BETRAYED: Democrats now admit they knew all along that millions would lose their existing health plans

naturalnews.com

Originally published October 30 2013health

BETRAYED: Democrats now admit they knew all along that millions would lose their existing health plans

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) The degree of betrayal found in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is finally coming to the surface... and it's intense. As a top Democrat admitted today, the Democrats knew all along that Obamacare would cause millions to lose health care coverage. Yet they continued to promote it with premeditated lies such as, "You can keep your current health plan if you like it" and "your health insurance costs will be lower than a phone bill."

"We knew that there would be some policies that would not qualify and therefore people would [lose their existing coverage]," said House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer in a NationalReview.com article.

National Review goes on to report this astonishing exchange:

Asked by another reporter how repeated statements by Obama to the contrary weren't "misleading," Hoyer said "I don't think the message was wrong. I think the message was accurate. It was not precise enough…[it] should have been caveated with -- 'assuming you have a policy that in fact does do what the bill is designed to do.'"

In other words, lying to the public is not "wrong." It's accurate but not precise!

This is how Democrats think, of course: lie to the public to gain their contrived support, and then when things go wrong, shove a gun in everyone's face to force them to comply with their Big Government mandates. That's the entire plan of Obamacare and most socialists: obedience at gunpoint. Mao would have been proud to call Obamacare his own.

Obama administration also knew that "millions could not keep their health insurance

The lies of the Obama administration are now so blatant and undeniable that even the mainstream media is starting to expose them. NBC News reported today that "millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years."

NBC News goes on to report:

...50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a "cancellation" letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don't meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience "sticker shock."

...the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, "if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan," was still saying in 2012, "If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance."


Like everything else spouted by Obama, all these claims were of course outrageous lies.

Lies within lies wrapped in lies and packaged in the language of "benefits"

Obama is not merely a liar but a sociopathic liar who feels no remorse for the massive social cost of his actions. He deliberately misleads Americans into supporting a plan that was designed from the start to destroy the American economy and leave tens of millions of people medical bankrupt with no insurance whatsoever.

This isn't simply a debate about who wins or loses, it's an issue that impacts the lives of tens of millions of Americans. It now appears that 16 million Americans will lose their health insurance thanks to Obamacare, and employers are slashing job hours, employment positions and more. Obamacare is devastating the U.S. economy and culture like an economic apocalypse.

Here are just a few of the lies we've all been told by Obama and his criminal cohorts:

LIE #1) "The average family insurance plan will cost $2500 less per year."

LIE #2) "You can keep your plan, period." (Total lie!)

LIE #3) "You can keep your doctor." (Vicious lie!)

LIE #4) "The ACA will only add $900 billion to the deficit over the next ten years." (Mathematical lie.)

LIE #5) "This is all about providing affordable health insurance to nearly all Americans." (In truth, it's all about the utter destruction of the U.S. economy, workers and employers.)

Rate increases of 400% - 500% or more now common

As we're all now discovering, Obamacare isn't "affordable" health care; it's health care mandated at price-gouging monopoly rates.

For example, as NBC News reports:

George Schwab, 62, of North Carolina, said he was "perfectly happy" with his plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which also insured his wife for a $228 monthly premium. But this past September, he was surprised to receive a letter saying his policy was no longer available. The "comparable" plan the insurance company offered him carried a $1,208 monthly premium and a $5,500 deductible.

Natural News reported on a case where one couple was being told they would have to pay 539% more for health care coverage, thanks to Obamacare. Their rates were going up from $212 per month to $1,356.60 per month.

For Obama to call these health care plans "affordable" is an outrageous lie, and it's going to financially devastate millions of families across America who simply cannot afford these outlandish rate increases. Yes, even those who voted for Obamacare and optimistically supported Obamacare are going to be hit with higher rates, too.

Americans outraged at depth of multi-layered betrayal, lies, deceit by Obama and the Democrats

Here are just a few of the user comments on the revelation that Obama and the Democrats KNEW all this would happen but lied about it anyway:

What a low life piece of garbage steny hoyer is. The dems LIED to ALL Americans and don't give a damn that they did. If this doesn't outrage the people who bought into obamacare then this country is finished. Socialism has won. What a sad day for this once great country, America, land of the used to be free.

They knew and still they went along with the lie. The republicans tried and tried to warn everybody and were demonized for it by the media and the rest of the libs. I bet this still doesn't wake the drones up from their stupor.

I guess people aren't laughing at Ted Cruz anymore.

Did they also know that their agenda would be toxic to the business community, and that in the first year of the socialist's second term, 90 million people would be unemployed? Did they know more people would require food stamps and disability payments? Did they know that millions of young people would be without jobs or hope? How much did they know? And WHY do they hate America?

Even back in 2009 when they were hiding behind locked doors, keeping the Republicans from finding out this stuff they had already decided to screw the population. You must be an idiot to support Democrats when they do stuff like that. Now the Republicans are demonized for trying to protect the citizens from this sleazy, mean spirited BS.

So on how many other occasions such as COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM are you also lying. At this point we will assume 100% of the time.

They KNEW and they LIED. It's time to light up the Congressional switchboard.

To a liberal a lie is completely truthful as long as it suckers you.

"...I think the message was accurate." - Thank you Steny, I'm sure it was our fault, we must have listened wrong.

Liars. And it's none of their damned business what coverage is appropriate for anyone. Who made Obama a health care expert? As a 59 year old woman that is not having more children, I don't need maternity coverage. With this regime, who knows what will happen tho? King Obama for sure. He needs to go, along with all of them.

I have no insurance, before obamacare I was responsible for 100% of my health care costs. After obamacare I'm still responsible for 100% of my health care costs, but I have to pay the government a fine out of the money I was going to pay for my health care with. Is this a great plan or what?




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Drone Pilot With PTSD Told That He Killed 1,626 People

By JG Vibes | October 25, 2013 |

Man is traumatized after becoming a mass murderer 

A Reaper MQ-9 Remotely Piloted Air System (RPAS) prepares for takeoff in Afghanistan. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
A Reaper MQ-9 Remotely Piloted Air System (RPAS) prepares for takeoff in Afghanistan. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
(INTELLIHUB) — Drone warfare is a disturbing practice on many levels but one of the most troubling things about this is it allows people to be completely detached from the violence that they are participating in.
However, recently a story has emerged about one of these drone pilots who actually became sickened by their job and refused to continue.
Brandon Bryant first made the news months ago when he came forward to tell his story about how he killed a small child with a drone, and was told by his supervisors that the child was just “a dog with 2 legs”.
Now Bryant is in the news again after learning the total death toll that he was responsible for during his time as a drone pilot.
Bryant was horrified to learn that during his time as a drone pilot he killed at least 1,626 people.  During these murders Bryant was in a translucent state that he called “zombie mode”, where he would just go through the mechanical motions without even realizing that he was taking peoples lives.
When he finally had a change of heart and decided to leave, the Air Force offered him a $109,000 bonus to stay and continue killing people, but he declined.
Now Bryant has dedicated his life to speaking out against drone warfare, and reaching out to other potential drone pilots to let them know that operating a drone is not a videogame, it is killing people by remote control.

Sources:
[1] Report: Former drone operator shares his inner torment – WTKR

Facebook may start logging your cursor movements

Facebook wants to know not just where your mouse ends up, but where it's been.

Caress this chipmunk's cheeks with your pointer? Facebook wants to know about it.
Facebook is considering collecting yet more data from users in the form of tracked mouse movements, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal Wednesday. Your scrolls, your hovers, your highlights, your right clicks: Facebook wants them all.
It’s not uncommon for websites to minutely track the items that users click on to see how they interact with different pages. A heat map of a page can show where most people end up clicking, giving sites an idea of how users’ eyes travel and parse the information there.
But Facebook’s tracking would be another level of tracking entirely. According to the WSJ, Facebook will be paying attention to the areas a cursor lingers over, even without a click or other interaction. This seems like a bit of a strange motion to track, as if users are out there lovingly tracing the facial profiles of their family members or ex-crushes like they might do on a photograph. But if there’s meaning to be had, Facebook will have it.
In addition to tracking mouse movements, Facebook will also be gathering mobile data. It can’t track finger-lingers over a touchscreen, thankfully, but the company will be noting when, for instance, “a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone.”

The Data Hackers


Surveillance 2010, artwork by Will Varner
Big Bro is watching you. Inside your mobile phone and hidden behind your web browser are little known software products marketed by contractors to the government that can follow you around anywhere. No longer the wide-eyed fantasies of conspiracy theorists, these technologies are routinely installed in all of our data devices by companies that sell them to Washington for a profit.
That’s not how they’re marketing them to us, of course. No, the message is much more seductive: data, Silicon Valley is fond of saying, is the new oil. And the Valley’s message is clear enough: we can turn your digital information into fuel for pleasure and profits—if you just give us access to your location, your correspondence, your history, and the entertainment that you like.
Ever played Farmville? Checked into Foursquare? Listened to music on Pandora? These new social apps come with an obvious price tag: the annoying advertisements that we believe to be the fee we have to pay for our pleasure. But there’s a second, more hidden price tag—the reams of data about ourselves that we give away. Just like raw petroleum, it can be refined into many things—the high-octane jet fuel for our social media and the asphalt and tar of our past that we would rather hide or forget.
We willingly hand over all of this information to the big data companies and in return they facilitate our communications and provide us with diversions. Take Google, which offers free email, data storage, and phone calls to many of us, or Verizon, which charges for smartphones and home phones. We can withdraw from them anytime, just as we believe that we can delete our day-to-day social activities from Facebook or Twitter.
But there is a second kind of data company of which most people are unaware: high-tech outfits that simply help themselves to our information in order to allow U.S. government agencies to dig into our past and present. Some of this is legal, since most of us have signed away the rights to our own information on digital forms that few ever bother to read, but much of it is, to put the matter politely, questionable.
This second category is made up of professional surveillance companies. They generally work for or sell their products to the government—in other words, they are paid with our tax dollars—but we have no control over them. Harris Corporation provides technology to the FBI to track, via our mobile phones, where we go; Glimmerglass builds tools that the U.S. intelligence community can use to intercept overseas calls; and companies like James Bimen Associates design software to hack into our computers.
There is also a third category: data brokers like Arkansas-based Acxiom. These companies monitor our Google searches and sell the information to advertisers. They make it possible for Target to offer baby clothes to pregnant teenagers, but also can keep track of your reading habits and the questions you pose to Google on just about anything from pornography to terrorism—presumably to sell you Viagra and assault rifles.
Locating You
Edward Snowden has done the world a great service by telling us what the National Security Agency does and how it has sweet-talked and bullied the first category of companies into handing over our data. As a result, perhaps you’ve considered switching providers from AT&T to T-Mobile or Dropbox to the more secure Spider- Oak. After all, who wants some anonymous government bureaucrat listening in on or monitoring your online and phone life?
Missing from this debate, however, have been the companies that get contracts to break into our homes in broad daylight and steal all our information on the taxpayer’s dime. We’re talking about a multi-billion dollar industry whose tools are also available for those companies to sell to others or even use them for profit or vicarious pleasure. So just what do these companies do and who are they?
The simplest form of surveillance technology is an IMSI catcher. (IMSI stands for International Mobile Subscriber Identity, which is unique to every mobile phone.) These highly portable devices pose as mini-mobile phone towers and can capture all the mobile-phone signals in an area. In this way, they can effectively identify and locate all phone users in a particular place. Some are small enough to fit into a briefcase, others are no larger than a mobile phone. Once deployed, the IMSI catcher tricks phones into wirelessly sending it data.
By setting up several IMSI catchers in an area and measuring the speed of the responses or “pings” from a phone, an analyst can follow the movement of anyone with a mobile phone even when they are not in use.
One of the key players in this field is the Melbourne, Florida-based Harris Corporation, which has been awarded almost $7 million in public contracts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) since 2001, mostly for radio communication equipment. For years, the company has also designed software for the agency’s National Crime Information Center to track missing persons, fugitives, criminals, and stolen property.
Harris was recently revealed to have designed an IMSI catcher for the FBI that the company named “Stingray.” Court testimony by FBI agents has confirmed the existence of the devices dating back to at least 2002. Other companies like James Bimen Associates of Virginia have allegedly designed custom software to help the FBI hack into people’s computers, according to research by Chris Soghoian of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The FBI has not denied this. The Bureau “hires people who have hacking skill, and they purchase tools that are capable of doing these things,” a former official in the FBI’s cyber division told the Wall Street Journal recently. “When you do, it’s because you don’t have any other choice.”
The technologies these kinds of companies exploit often rely on software vulnerabilities. Hacking software can be installed from a USB drive, or delivered remotely by disguising it as an email attachment or software update. Once in place, an analyst can rifle through a target’s files, log every keystroke, and take pictures of the screen every second. For example, SS8 of Milpitas, California, sells software called Intellego that claims to allow government agencies to “see what [the targets] see, in real time” including “draft-only emails, attached files, pictures, and videos.” Such technology can also remotely turn on phone and computer microphones, as well as computer or cellphone cameras to spy on the target in real-time.
Charting You
What the FBI does, however intrusive, is small potatoes compared to what the National Security Agency dreams of doing: getting and storing the data traffic not just of an entire nation, but of an entire planet. This became a tangible reality some two decades ago as the telecommunications industry began mass adoption of fiber-optic technology. This means that data is no longer transmitted as electrical signals along wires that were prone to interference and static, but as light beams.
Enter companies like Glimmerglass, yet another northern California outfit. In September 2002, Glimmerglass started to sell a newly patented product consisting of 210 tiny gold-coated mirrors mounted on microscopic hinges etched on to a single wafer of silicon. It can help transmit data as beams of light across the undersea fiber optic cables that carry an estimated 90 percent of trans-border telecommunications data. The advantage of this technology is that it is dirt cheap and—for the purposes of the intelligence agencies—the light beams can easily be copied with almost no noticeable loss in quality.
“With Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Systems (IOS), any signal travelling over fiber can be redirected in milliseconds, without adversely affecting customer traffic,” says the company on its public website.
Glimmerglass does not deny that its equipment can be used by intelligence agencies to capture global Internet traffic. In fact, it assumes that this is probably happening. “We believe that our 3D MEMS technology—as used by governments and various agencies—is involved in the collection of intelligence from sensors, satellites, and undersea fiber systems,” Keith May, Glimmerglass’s director of business development, told the trade magazineAviation Week in 2010. “We are deployed in several countries that are using it for lawful interception.”
In a confidential brochure, Glimmerglass has a series of graphics that, it claims, show just what its software is capable of. One displays a visual grid of the Facebook messages of a presumably fictional “John Smith.” His profile is linked to a number of other individuals (identified with images, user names, and IDs) via arrows indicating how often he connected to each of them. A second graphic shows a grid of phone calls made by a single individual that allows an operator to select and listen to audio of any of his specific conversations. Yet others display Glimmerglass software being used to monitor webmail and instant message chats.
“The challenge of managing information has become the challenge of managing the light,” says an announcer in a company video on their public website. “With Glimmerglass, customers have full control of massive flows of intelligence from the moment they access them.”
This description mirrors technology described in documents provided by Edward Snowden to the Guardian newspaper.
Predicting You
Listening to phone calls, recording locations, and breaking into computers are just one part of the tool kit that the data-mining companies offer to U.S. (and other) intelligence agencies. Think of them as the data equivalents of oil and natural gas drilling companies that are ready to extract the underground riches that have been stashed over the years in strongboxes in our basements.
What government agencies really want, however, is not just the ability to mine, but to refine those riches into the data equivalent of high-octane fuel for their investigations in very much the way we organize our own data to conduct meaningful relationships, find restaurants, or discover new music on our phones and computers.
These technologies—variously called social network analysis or semantic analysis tools—are now being packaged by the surveillance industry as ways to expose potential threats that could come from surging online communities of protesters or anti-government activists. Take Raytheon, a major U.S. military manufacturer, which makes Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, Maverick air-to- ground missiles, Patriot surface-to-air missiles, and Tomahawk submarine-launched cruise missiles. Their latest product is a software package eerily named “Riot” that claims to be able to predict where individuals are likely to go next using technology that mines data from social networks like Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter.
Raytheon’s Rapid Information Overlay Technology software—yes, that’s how they got the acronym Riot—extracts location data from photos and comments posted online by individuals and analyzes this information. The result is a variety of spider diagrams that purportedly will show where that individual is most likely to go next, what she likes to do, and whom she communicates with or is most likely to communicate with in the near future.
A 2010 video demonstration of the software was recently published online by the Guardian. In it, Brian Urch of Raytheon shows how Riot can be used to track “Nick”—a company employee—in order to predict the best time and place to steal his computer or put spy software on it. “Six a.m. appears to be the most frequently visited time at the gym,” says Urch. “So if you ever did want to try to get a hold of Nick—or maybe get a hold of his laptop—you might want to visit the gym at 6:00 a.m. on Monday.”
“Riot is a big data analytics system design we are working on with industry, national labs, and commercial partners to help turn massive amounts of data into useable information to help meet our nation’s rapidly changing security needs,” Jared Adams, a spokesman for Raytheon’s intelligence and information systems department, told the Guardian. The company denies that anyone has yet bought Riot, but U.S. government agencies certainly appear more than eager to purchase such tools.
For example, in January 2012 the FBI posted a request for an app that would allow it to “provide an automated search and scrape capability of social networks including Facebook and Twitter and [i]mmediately translate foreign language tweets into English.” In January 2013, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration asked contractors to propose apps “to generate an assessment of the risk to the aviation transportation system that may be posed by a specific individual” using “specific sources of current, accurate, and complete non-governmental data.”
Privacy activists say that the Riot package is troubling indeed. “This sort of software allows the government to surveil everyone,” Ginger McCall, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Open Government program, told NBC News. “It scoops up a bunch of information about totally innocent people. There seems to be no legitimate reason to get this.”
Refining fuel from underground deposits has allowed us to travel vast distances by buses, trains, cars, and planes for pleasure and profit but at an unintentional cost: the gradual warming of our planet. Likewise, the refining of our data into social apps for pleasure, profit, and government surveillance is also coming at a cost: the gradual erosion of our privacy and ultimately our freedom of speech.
Ever tried yelling back at a security camera? You know that it is on. You know someone is watching the footage, but it doesn’t respond to complaint, threats, or insults. Instead, it just watches you in a forbidding manner. Today, the surveillance state is so deeply enmeshed in our data devices that we don’t even scream back because technology companies have convinced us that we need to be connected to them to be happy.
With a lot of help from the surveillance industry, Big Bro has already won the fight to watch all of us all the time—unless we decide to do something about it.
Pratap Chatterjee, a TomDispatch regular, is executive director of CorpWatch and a board member of Amnesty International USA. He is the author of Halliburton’s Army(Nation Books) and Iraq, Inc. This article first appeared on TomDispatch. com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt.

Don’t Worry – The Government Says That The Inflation You See Is Just Your Imagination

Redd Fox HypnotizedIf you believe that there is high inflation in the United States, you are just imagining things.  That is the message that the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve would have us to believe.  You might have noticed that the government announced on Wednesday that the cost of living increase for Social Security beneficiaries will only be 1.5 percent next year.  This is one of the smallest cost of living increases that we have ever seen.  The federal government is able to get away with this because the official numbers say that there is hardly any inflation in the U.S. right now.  Of course anyone that shops for groceries or that pays bills regularly knows what a load of nonsense the official inflation rate is.  The U.S. government has changed the way that inflation is calculated numerous times since 1978, and each time it has been changed the goal has been to make inflation appear to be even lower.  According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if the inflation rate was still calculated the same way that it was back when Jimmy Carter was president, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere between 8 and 10 percent today.  But if the mainstream news actually reported such a number, everyone would be screaming and yelling about getting inflation under control.  Instead, the super low number that gets put out to the public makes it look like the Federal Reserve has plenty of room to do even more reckless money printing.  It is a giant scam, but most Americans are falling for it.
Meanwhile, the prices of the things that most Americans buy on a regular basis just keep going up.  The following are just a few examples of price inflation that we have seen lately...
-McDonald's has killed the dollar menu because it is becoming impossible to "make any money selling burgers for $1".
But don't worry - the government says that the inflation you see is just your imagination.
-Amazon.com has raised the minimum order size required for free shipping from $25 to $35.
But don't worry - you can afford to order more stuff thanks to the great new job that you got during this "economic recovery".
-It is being projected that those using natural gas to heat their homes will see their heating costs rise by 13 percent this winter.
But don't worry - "global warming" should kick in to high gear any day now.
-The price of chocolate has gone up by 45 percent since 2007, and it is being projected that it will now be increasing at an even faster pace.
But don't worry - eating chocolate is bad for you anyway.
-Thanks to Obamacare, the health insurance premiums of many American families are absolutely skyrocketing.  As I wrote about the other day, one family down in Texas just got a letter informing them that their health insurance premiums are going up by 539 percent.
But don't worry - this is just "health care reform" in action.
Meanwhile, things just continue to get tougher for middle class American families.  Household incomes have actually been declining for five years in a row and total consumer credit has risen by a whopping 22 percent over the past three years.
The quality of our jobs continues to go down and our paychecks are not keeping up with inflation.  In fact, 40 percent of all U.S. workers are now making less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968 after you account for inflation.
So what do the "authorities" say that the solution to our problems is?
They want even more inflation of course.  According to CNBC, many Federal Reserve officials (including Janet Yellen) believe that what the U.S. economy really needs is a lot more inflation...
Inflation is widely reviled as a kind of tax on modern life, but as Federal Reserve policy makers prepare to meet this week, there is growing concern inside and outside the Fed that inflation is not rising fast enough.
Some economists say more inflation is just what the American economy needs to escape from a half-decade of sluggish growth and high unemployment.
The Fed has worked for decades to suppress inflation, but economists, including Janet Yellen, President Obama's nominee to lead the Fed starting next year, have long argued that a little inflation is particularly valuable when the economy is weak. Rising prices help companies increase profits; rising wages help borrowers repay debts. Inflation also encourages people and businesses to borrow money and spend it more quickly.
The rest of that article goes on and on about how wonderful inflation is for an economy and about how the U.S. economy desperately needs some more of it.
Well, if that was actually true, then the Weimar Republic should have had one of the best economies in the history of mankind.
But this inevitably happens when a nation starts producing fiat currency that is backed by absolutely nothing.  There is always a temptation to just print a little bit more.
In the end, we are going to be destroyed by our own foolishness.  We have the de facto reserve currency of the planet, and the rest of the world has trusted it for decades.  But now we are systematically destroying our currency, and the rest of the globe is looking on in horror.
If you want to see a very good example of the impact that inflation has had on our economy in recent years, just check out this amazing chart which shows what the Federal Reserve's reckless policies have done to the prices of commodities.
Ultimately, the U.S. dollar will be destroyed, and we will have done it to ourselves.
Many people are attempting to protect themselves against this inevitability by putting a lot of their money into hard assets such as gold and silver, but before you do that you might want to make sure that you don't have a vengeful spouse that will toss it all into a dumpster someday.  The following is from a recent New York Post article...
A Colorado man was so angry at his ex-wife for divorcing him that he had the couple’s life savings of $500,000 converted to gold — then tossed it in a dumpster so she couldn’t have any of it, the Colorado Springs Gazette reports.
In June, Earl Ray Jones, 52, of Divide, Colorado, was ordered by a judge to pay $3,000 a month to the woman he’d been married to for 25 years, so he pillaged the couple’s retirement account and had it converted into 22 pounds worth of gold and silver bars,  the paper reports.
Jones claims he then tossed the modern-day treasure into a dumpster behind a motel, where he had been living temporarily, later telling the judge he had no money to give his ex-wife, according to the paper.
Did that story make you smile?  It sure did the trick for me.
But that story is also a picture of what the Federal Reserve is doing with our dollar.
Our currency has been used for decades by almost everyone else around the planet.  In fact, more U.S. dollars are used outside of our country than inside of it.
But now the Federal Reserve is systematically trashing the dollar and the rest of the globe is starting to lose faith in it.
Instead of realizing their mistakes, Fed officials say that we need to create even more inflation and they just keep on wildly printing more money.
In the end, we will all pay a great price for their foolishness.

Environmental Fascism: The Ecofascists Are Slowly But Surely Taking Over America

EcofascistsThe environmental fascists believe that if people are allowed to have large amounts of freedom and liberty that the planet will literally be destroyed.  That sounds crazy, but that is what they actually believe.  Left to our own devices, they are fully convinced that global warming and out of control pollution will transform the earth into an uninhabitable hellhole.  Therefore, they believe that it has become necessary to strictly manage human behavior “for the good of the environment”.  With each passing year, the control of the social planners gets even tighter.  Today, they have banned certain kinds of light bulbs, they are putting mandatory “smart meters” into our homes, and they have instituted all kinds of ridiculous regulations concerning what you can do with your own land.  Tomorrow, they plan to put “black boxes” into our vehicles and move most of us into “stack-and-pack” housing that has communal bathrooms and no elevators.  There is a reason why these people are called ecofascists.  The “true believers” of the environmental fascism movement actually believe that they are “saving the world” by being control freaks.  They truly believe that they know better than the rest of us, and they love to get into positions of political power so that they can impose their will on everyone around them.
The environmental fascists are constantly “pushing the envelope” and doing whatever they can to use the power of the government to impose new rules on all the rest of us.  Most of the time, Americans just take it without ever fighting back.  For example, a car wash for a high school cheerleading squad was recently shut down because the cheerleaders were “in violation of water discharge laws“…
It’s hard to wave your spirit fingers when the city shuts down the cheerleading squad’s fundraising car wash to protect the environment.
This is what happened to Lincoln High School cheerleaders trying to raise money to attend a national competition in April. The San Jose Mercury reports that local environmental officials warned the high school cheerleaders that their car wash violated the city’s water discharge laws.
“We had a visit from the city of San Jose Environmental Services Department who said that the car washes at Hoover [Middle School] are in violation of water discharge laws, therefore we had to cancel this and all future car washes,” said an email that was sent out to neighborhood email lists on Oct. 18.
Fortunately, there are some Americans that are still willing to stand up and fight back against this emerging ecofascism.  A recent Businessweek article profiled one north Idaho couple that is vigorously fighting back against the ridiculous demands of the EPA…
Four years ago the Sacketts were filling in their lot with dirt and rock, preparing to build a simple three-bedroom home in a neighborhood where other houses have stood for years. Then three federal officials showed up and demanded they stop construction. The agency claimed the .63-acre lot was a wetland, protected under the Clean Water Act.
The Sacketts say they were stunned. The owners of an excavation company, they had secured all the necessary local permits. And Chantell Sackett says that before work began, she drove two hours to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to consult with an Army Corps of Engineers official. She says the official told her orally, though not in writing, that she didn’t need a federal permit. “We did all the right things,” she says.
The EPA issued an order requiring the Sacketts to put the land back the way it was, removing the piles of fill material and replanting the vegetation they had cleared away. The property was to be fenced off and the Sacketts would be required to submit annual reports about its condition to the EPA. The agency threatened to fine them up to $32,500 a day until they complied.
Sadly, this kind of thing is happening all over the nation.  The EPA is completely and totally out of control, and they seem to be obsessed with making life absolute hell for farmers and private landowners.
But over in Europe, environmental fascism is actually even worse than it is in the United States.  In fact, one new regulation that was recently implemented bans Europeans from owning large vacuum cleaners
Incandescent light bulbs have already been removed from the shelves. Next being removed are larger size vacuum cleaners. Germany’s online flagship daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports: “Beginning September 2014 in the EU only vacuum cleaners that consume less than 1600 watts may be sold. From 2017 only a maximum of 900 watts will be allowed.”
Ultimately, the ecofascists intend to manage virtually every detail of our lives, because literally everything that we do “affects the environment” in some way.
According to the Los Angeles Times, one of the next things they hope to do is to put “black boxes” in our vehicles that they can use to tax us and track the “damage” that we are doing to the environment…
As America’s road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car.
The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America’s major roads.
The usually dull arena of highway planning has suddenly spawned intense debate and colorful alliances. Libertarians have joined environmental groups in lobbying to allow government to use the little boxes to keep track of the miles you drive, and possibly where you drive them — then use the information to draw up a tax bill.
What I find humorous about the above excerpt is that the L.A. Times is trying to get us to believe that this is something that “libertarians” actually want.
Another thing that the ecofascists have planned for the future is to move much of the population into “eco-friendly” stack-and-pack living environments.  These stack-and-pack living environments were described in a recent article by Suzanne Eovaldi
A typical stack-and-pack living area in the 200 square foot APodment bulding in Sammamish, WA is already developed. Occupant Judy Green (Seattle Times 5-12-13) “shares the kitchen with seven other tenants on the second floor.”  With no elevators, she has to walk up and down six flights of stairs to get to her loft! Bathrooms often are communal; no or few cars are allowed because of global warming.
The ultimate goal is for the government to watch, track, monitor and control everything that we do “for the good of humanity”.
And of course this emerging “Big Brother” control grid has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years.  In fact, it is being reported that the United States spied on 60 million Spanish phone calls in just one single month recently, and according to CNN, the U.S. had even been spying on the private phone conversations of 35 foreign leaders…
The release of further allegations of National Security Agency surveillance efforts caused the Spanish government to summon the U.S. ambassador Monday, and The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House ordered a halt to some eavesdropping on foreign leaders after learning of it this summer.
Quoting unidentified U.S. officials, the newspaper’s website said the wiretapping of about 35 foreign leaders was disclosed to the White House as part of a review of surveillance programs ordered by President Barack Obama after NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information on the NSA’s phone monitoring systems.
The White House ordered a halt to the monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and unspecified other leaders, the newspaper reported. The Journal report did not specify who gave the shutdown order or the date it was issued.
And this “control grid” is getting much tighter and much more oppressive on the local level as well.  For example, just check out what happened to one Texas woman recently
A Texas woman was arrested, strip-searched and jailed for an overdue traffic ticket Wednesday, a local CBS affiliate first reported.
Sarah Boaz said she was cuffed outside her Richland Hills home by an officer who was waiting for her when she stepped out to go to work, the New York Daily News reported.
The officer told her a warrant had been issued for her arrest after she failed to pay a summons for running a stop sign in August. Mrs. Boaz admitted that she didn’t pay the fine because she lost the summons.
“I’m like nobody puts out a bench warrant after 60 days,” she told the Daily News. “Why would you do that?”
Mrs. Boaz said she was forced to step into a jail cell and remove her clothes for a search. Her family bailed her out within a couple of hours.
When most people read about stuff like this, they are absolutely outraged.
But the ecofascists actually love this kind of stuff.  They want an all-powerful government that will have the power to force people to do “what is right for the environment”.  In fact, many of them actually believe that the planet will not survive if government does not behave in such a manner.
In the end, they are not going to settle for anything less than total control.  They want to control where you live, what kind of work you do, what kind of transportation you use and even how many children you have.
It is a totalitarian system wrapped up in a “save the world” package.
And right now, the ecofascists are steadily gaining ground.  If they are going to be defeated, people need to start standing up for freedom and liberty while they still can.

Democrats Scramble to Distance Themselves from Obamacare


With the 2014 midterm elections just a year away, nervous Democrats have begun distancing themselves from what Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius now calls the Obamacare "debacle." 

"Our guys are frustrated by Obama's unforced errors," a Senate Democrat aide told Reuters on Wednesday. "How could the president not be ready for the rollout?"
Rep. Rick Nolan (D-MN) expressed frustration last week with the Obama Administration's failed rollout of Obama's signature legislative achievement.
"Some of us, myself included, are somewhat resentful [and] upset about the apparent incompetency in designing and rolling this thing out," said Nolan. "Who was it that said we are going to go ahead knowing it doesn't work? I would fire that person."
The number four Democrat in the House, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), said, "I absolutely believe that somebody should be held accountable."
Other Democrats now say they agree with Republicans that a delay of the individual mandate may be the only way to salvage the disaster and save face.
"I think the administration is going to have to look at it [delay of the individual mandate]. and I'd encourage them to do so," said Rep. Gene Green (D-TX).
Five Democrats have now asked for the Obama Administration to seek a refund from the contractors responsible for the Obamacare website fiasco. Reps. Ron Barber (D-AZ), William Enyart (D-IL), Pete Gallego (D-TX), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and Filemon Vela (D-TX) wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder urging the reimbursement effort.
The Democrat defections come as conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity have poured an estimated $2 million into ad buys targeting Democrats in vulnerable districts with messages highlighting their embrace of Obamacare.

Obamacare: Ongoing Disaster With No End In Sight

by
October 31st, 2013
Updated 10/31/2013
Affordable Care Act has all the hallmarks of a ‘Lead Zeppelin’
No one has ever seen anything like it in the history of this nation! Nothing even comes close. We’re talking about the proverbial Crash & Burn, but on a truly epic scale.
Screen Shot 2013-10-31 at 8.33.46 AM
Obamacare (also known as the ‘Affordable’ Care Act or ACA) has proven to be the most disastrous piece of legislation in American history, bar none. And it just keeps getting worse. Yes, worse, even when you thought that they couldn’t “sink the Titanic a second time“.
How did we get here?
Let’s start by considering the following quote from Nancy Pelosi, a purported congresswoman from the Bay area. We say purported because a congressperson is supposed to represent his or her constituency. We wonder how she was doing that while uttering the following preposterous comment:

“But we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it….”

Spoken by Nancy Pelosi in March 2010 when she was Speaker of the House
You can’t make this stuff up!
Can you imagine passing the most costly and expensive, far-reaching and expansive, cumbersome and unwieldy, untested and unproven, flawed and defective, massive and consequential piece of legislation in the wake of the longest and most severe economic recession (It’s really a depression!) since the Great Depression of the 1930s? !
That’s exactly what these elected representatives did. In the face of the greatest public outcry ever seen from the body politic.
Look at the list of groups who have weighed in — vehemently — against this oppressive and ill-thought-out law.
Why do people hate Obamacare?
Why America still hates Obamacare
Why is ObamaCare so unpopular? 4 theories
Why are so many people against Obamacare?
5 Reasons America’s Young May Hate Obamacare
Why doctors hate ObamaCare
Labor Groups against ObamaCare
The Catholic Church vs. ‘ObamaCare’
Groups Rally Against The Affordable Care Act
9 Reasons Why Many Liberals Absolutely Hate Obamacare
9 Valid Concerns We Can All Have About Obamacare, Without Thinking It Will Literally Bring Hell On Earth
Obamacare: Worst Law Passed in Four Decades Must Be Stopped, Says Stockman
GOP Senators Rail Against Obamacare Before Obama Meeting
The Case Against Obamacare: Health Care Policy Series for the 112th Congress
Screen Shot 2013-10-31 at 8.55.34 AM
This very limited list of Obamacare haters does not include the most significant demographic of all.
Can you imagine that, during this relentless economic downturn and jobless faux recovery, the average citizen is forced to pay for Obamacare even though he or she may be so destitute they cannot fund it out of pocket. Under threat of IRS penalty, these same folks then suffer the indignity of having to pay a fine when they cannot even buy enough food to eat or gas up the car!
Truly, tha ACA has proven to be a disaster on every front … without exception!
Here are some other sentiments expressed through the headlines of the US mainstream media which tell an even worse story, if that’s possible.
Consumer Reports to Readers: Avoid Obamacare
Obamacare Will Increase Health Spending By $7,450 For A Typical Family of Four [Updated] – Forbes
Obamacare Is Another Private Sector Rip-Off Of Americans
Obama under fire as Americans lose prior health plans
Report: Obama administration knew millions would be forced to change insurance
Democrat aide does about-face on Obamacare
Sebelius Thrust Into Firestorm on Exchanges
Wolf Blitzer Sides With GOP: Delay Obamacare For A Year
Obama blames ‘bad apple’ insurers for canceled coverage
But perhaps its greatest weaknesses are found in its implementation.
Here are the headlines coming in from around the country for the past month or so.  They come from both blue states and red states.  They appears in both liberal newspapers as well as conservative publications.   One really wonders how the ACA was allowed to get this point of shockingly incompetent implementation? To describe it as an ongoing train wreck would be a gross understatement, but we must call a train wreck a train wreck”.
Screen Shot 2013-10-31 at 8.35.53 AM
Another Democrat Calls ObamaCare Implementation a “Real Disaster”
U.S. Obamacare data hub ‘experiencing an outage’, Connecticut says
Obamacare Website Failure Threatens Health Coverage For Millions Of Americans
Flaws in Obamacare, online exchange meltdown are disasters of Obama’s own making
Obamacare’s Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are
When so many headlines graphically depict so much that is wrong with the catastrophic ‘Affordable’ Care Act, we wonder when those who have the power to remedy this situation will step up to do so?  There is no question that lacking the resolve to reverse the current Obamacare course will lead to every manner of disaster that is portrayed in the MUST SEE video shown at the following link.  It’s also quite entertaining!
8 Reasons ObamaCare is an Epic Disaster
State of the Nation 2013
October 31, 2013
admin@stateofthenation2012.com
Author’s Note:
There must be something very deep and profound behind Obamacare that is completely hidden from view, yes?
Obamacare: The Hidden Agenda
References:
Obama Flaunts The Most Flawed Legislation In US History
©2013 State of the Nation 2013
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