Coming at the heels of Wednesday’s news that the NSA was secretly obtaining hundreds of millions of phone records belonging to American citizens, we have new reports from the Washington Post of yet another Top Secret program targeting Internet data.  Operation code-name PRISM refers to a Top Secret partnership between the NSA and 9 of the top Internet firms in the United States including Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and Apple.  Since the news broke on Thursday officials from the companies involved have been coming forward with denials that they had any knowledge of the program or that the government has direct access to their servers, as alleged by the leaked information on PRISM. Slides released by the Washington Post that outline the program detail the types of data collected which include email, photos, video, chat with voice and video, Voice of IP (VoIP), stored data, file transfers, social networking details, and “special requests”.  Essentially your entire online life is available to the government.  Anything you post to Facebook (regardless of your privacy settings), your emails, your Google Drive files, your photos, and any phone calls or “Hangouts” you are involved in over the Internet are possibly being collected by the government. This is a […]

The Guardian just broke this gem yesterday.  It would seem that the National Security Administration (NSA) has obtained a top secret court order compelling Verizon to turn over “all call detail records” on an “ongoing, daily basis” for all calls “between the United States and abroad” or those “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” There you have it.  From the issuance of this court order, which took place on April 25, 2013 until its expiration on July 19, 2013 Verizon is ordered to provide the NSA with records on every single local call and call between the US and other countries to traverse the Verizon network.  Verizon is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the United States.  We are probably talking about hundreds of millions of call records.  This is unfathomable.  By way of this order the government is obtaining just about every detail related to these calls including the telephone numbers of both call participants, the duration of the call, location information, and the time and date of the call.  Essentially the only information the government is not taking as part of this is the actual telephone conversation. This is an unprecedented level of privacy intrusion. […]

When I wrote about the Occupy Wall Street movement a few weeks ago I had not really intended on it becoming a recurring topic, but as events transpire I find myself compelled to speak out further.  The movement has continued to gain momentum and has spread all over the country, and to various locations around the world.  More people are getting involved, and more media attention is being cast in their direction.  Some of the attention has been on the movement itself, and some on the actions of the NYPD and other police departments in response to it. At this point, we should regard the Occupy movement as a potential danger.  It is very volatile.  I do not suggest that we should be concerned that it will escalate to a point of violence, though that is not out of the question, it seems unlikely at this point it time.  The danger stems from the fact that the protestors are so very disjointed.  There is no leader, and there is no clear mission or set of demands.  The protestors might as well be there for the simple fact that they have nothing better to do.  Clearly they share in their frustration […]

There is a protest taking place in New York City.  A rag-tag group of passionate citizens are making their voices heard regarding the economic mess taking place in our country, and the world.  The goal of the protest is simple; to occupy Wall St. for an extended period of time to draw attention to the misdoings of our banking institutions.  The protest began on Saturday, 9/17.  Around 1,000 protestors showed up.  That number has fluctuated over the following days of the protest.  A few hundred have been camping out overnight. The protestors are non-violent and receiving significant support from the Internet.  The protest was suggested by the Canadian magazine AdBusters and has been heavily promoted by the “hacktivist” group known as Anonymous.  The protest website (https://occupywallst.org/) is updated frequently on the current activities of the protestors.  Twitter is also being utilized heavily as a medium of communication from the people on the ground to the rest of the world.  Donations are being taken for the protest in general, and for food, camping supplies, and other needs.  The goal of the leaderless group is to occupy Wall St. for a few months in an effort to express their anger with what […]

By now everyone has heard that the United States is going to hit our current borrowing limit on August 2nd according to a US Treasury estimate.  The President has stated repeatedly that the limit must be raised or the US will default on its debt and trigger an unprecedented financial crisis that will have widespread and far-felt ramifications.  Congress is currently wrestling over how to address this most serious issue, though how much of it is genuine dissent and how much is put on to create a good show for the public is debatable. The President would like us to all think that the problem here is that the debt ceiling is not high enough.  That is not the problem.  The problem is that the debt ceiling is even an issue.  The problem is that the federal government is borrowing at such a rate that the federal debt is increasing by $40,000 per second!  That comes out to $3.456 BILLION a day.  And the President wants more. The choice here is a simple one.  We either continue down the path of reckless spending that will ultimately lead to the utter destruction of the dollar and the complete financial collapse of […]