Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Archive for the ‘Privacy’ Category

The Obama White House has created an uncertainty surplus as investors and corporations wonder what kinds of anti-business regulation the president might end up supporting.

This uncertainty is why we hear so much speculation about the economy moving toward recovery but not fast enough to create new jobs. Job creation requires investment and investment requires confidence. Even Wall Street adores certainty, and uncertainty over Obama’s intentions is causing businesses to sit on their cash instead of plowing it back into the economy.

As of the end of March, non-financial companies in the U.S. were holding on to $1.84 trillion in cash, a staggering 26 percent increase from a year earlier. Even companies with good earnings are reluctant to convert those earnings into capital investment and hiring until they get a clear sense of the regulatory climate that’s going to take root under Obama. And companies looking for signs of a pro-growth regulatory regime won’t find any comfort in the president’s apparent fondness for net neutrality regulation of the broadband Internet. Call it rent control for the Internet.

Like rent control, the changes being pushed like net neutrality by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski with White House backing are almost confiscatory when it comes to broadband networks that are the backbone of the Internet in America.

Mr. Genachowski’s “Third Way” plan for net neutrality regulation would force broadband operators to sell capacity on their networks to other companies, including rivals, at prices and conditions dictated by government regulators. You know where that leads: innovation is killed; stagnation and capacity shortages ensue.

By reclassifying broadband from an information service to a telecom service, the FCC would give itself sweeping powers to micro-manage America’s broadband networks. Unlike the Bell telephone networks of yesteryear, these broadband networks were not built with government subsidies in the form of monopoly markets and guaranteed returns. They were built and financed by their entrepreneurial owners, at their own risk.

Read more at Fox News

New U.S. Push to Regulate Internet Access

The Internet “Kill Switch”

US Cybersecurity Czar wants online “identity cards”

There go the 4th and 5th Amendments!

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno’s privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the “curtilage,” a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government’s intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Read more at Yahoo News

Senate Democrats Pass Bill Allowing Govt to Collect Addresses, ATM Records of Bank Customers

The Cyber Space Two Step: Privacy vs. Washington’s Big Brother Agenda

The Original Tea Party

View on YouTube

The Civil War and Gilded Age

View on YouTube

Progressivism

View on YouTube

FDR’s State And LBJ’s Society

View on YouTube

Big Gov’t and Tea Parties

View on YouTube

The Constitution and Freedom

Woodrow Wilson and the roots of Progressivism

Barack Obama and “The Second Bill of Rights”

America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution

We the Serfs

WHO has changed how the constitution is interpreted?

President Obama was highly critical of the Bush administration’s implementation of the Patriot Act but conceded at the time that it was a necessary evil.  While running for president he said that he would look into “dialing back”  various elements of the act.  

In February 2010, however, President Obama not only allowed all the current provisions under the Patriot Act to stand, he extended them for a year.

Last week, not only did he fail to pull back some of the FBI’s jurisdiction on information gathering, he seems to have expanded the previous law by adding four words to illuminate for federal law enforcement what powers they actually hold. Section 505 of the Patriot Act, covers National Security Letters (NSL’s) that are to be administered to various communications service providers (phone companies and ISP’s) by the FBI.  It allows them to secretly demand information regarding users private information.

Under the expanded definitions the information is allowed to be obtained without a court order for a person having been suspected of a crime, without said person ever even knowing they are being investigated:

• Your basic subscriber records, including your true identity and payment information;
• The identity of anyone using a particular IP address, username, or email adress;
• The email address or username of everyone you email or Instant Message, or who e-mails or instant messages you.
• The web address of every website you visit.
• Allows authorities to gain access to your private credit and financial information -
• Your ISP, bank, any other business from which the FBI gathers your private records is barred by law from notifying you.

Previously the language under the Patriot Act was vague and ambiguous; it requires Internet service providers to produce the records said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s national security division. “As written it also causes confusion and the potential for unnecessary litigation as some Internet companies have argued they are not always obligated to comply with the FBI requests.”

To assist in clarification, the administration added four words, “electronic communication transactional records” despite many issues brought to light by the San Francisco based Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as the ACLU. Essentially, the Department of Justice is asking Congress to pass this broad new language meant to expand the kinds of data that can be acquired through National Security Letters.

The administration’s proposal to change the Electronic Communications Privacy Act raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns. In a statement released Thursday, Senator Patrick Leahy D-VT said, “While the government should have the tools that it needs to keep us safe, American citizens should also have protections against improper intrusions into their private electronic communications and online transactions”.  Senator Leahy plans to hold hearings in the fall on this and other issues involving the law.

Read more at New Patriot Journal

Obama’s Assaults on Liberty Proceed Unabated

Poor Richard’s Internet

Government caused the problem, so of course the solution is… more government and violation of 4th Amendment rights.   How about we register and fingerprint the POLITICIANS who were responsible for the mortgage crisis, starting with Chris Dodd and Barney Frank?

Mortgage loan originators will have to be fingerprinted and sign up to a central registry to do business in future, according to final rules issued on Wednesday by the Federal Reserve and other regulators.

The rules are part of the Secure and Fair Enforcement for Mortgage Licensing Act of 2008, also called the S.A.F.E. Act.

They were issued by the Fed, Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, Office of Thrift Supervision, Farm Credit Administration and National Credit Union Administration.

Mortgage brokers came under tough scrutiny in the wake of the 2007-09 financial crisis, with some lawmakers and regulators sharply critical of underwriting standards and practices that were seen as so loose they helped foster a housing price bubble.

Read more at Reuters

Dodd-Frank Finance ‘Reform’ Sows Seeds of Next Financial Crisis

How Government Caused The Mortgage Crisis

Obama seizing control of Wall Street

New federal regulations issued this week stipulate that the electronic health records–that all Americans are supposed to have by 2014 under the terms of the stimulus law that President Barack Obama signed last year–must record not only the traditional measures of height and weight, but also the Body Mass Index: a measure of obesity.

The obesity-rating regulation states that every American’s electronic health record must: “Calculate body mass index. Automatically calculate and display body mass index (BMI) based on a patient’s height and weight.”

The law also requires that these electronic health records be available–with appropriate security measures–on a national exchange.
 
The new regulations are one of the first steps towards the government’s goal of universal adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) by 2014, as outlined in the 2009 economic stimulus law.  Specifically, the regulations issued on Tuesday by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Dr. David Blumenthal, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, define the “meaningful use” of electronic records. Under the stimulus law, health care providers–including doctors and hospitals–must establish “meaningful use” of EHRs by 2014 in order to qualify for federal subsidies. After that, they will be subjected to penalties in the form of diminished Medicare and Medicaid payments for not establishing “meaningful use” of EHRs.

Read more at CNS News

Obamacare grants sweeping new powers to HHS Secretary

View on YouTube

That wooshing sound in your ears is actually your 4th Amendment rights being flushed down the toilet.

Right Wing News reports:

It may take decades to discover all of the malignancies tucked away in the thousands upon thousands of pages of unread leftist legislation Comrade Obama & friends have been ramming through into law. Here‘s something that’s already come to light in their “comprehensive” attack on the financial sector:

A little noticed section (Section 152, page 63) of the Obama administration’s Financial Reform bill would create a new 1,000-employee office within the Department of the Treasury, the Office of Financial Research, which is raising alarm bells among Senate GOP staff, who say the entity would have broad powers to invade the privacy of American citizens and monitor their finances and financial activity at a level never before allowed by the federal government.

The OFR is a companion entity to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which is also proposed in the legislation (section 1001, page 1030).

Under the bill’s current language, according the Senate Banking Committee sources, the OFR under the new federal law would be allowed to collect any financial data it chooses, whether from individual citizens or businesses. Under the language of the bill, the data center can collect and maintain “all data necessary” to monitor the financial system. Wall Street executives are also concerned, because of the kind of “competitive intelligence” such an entity could collect.

Informed Americans who liked living in a free country have been scared out of their minds since November 2008.

Perhaps more chilling, the data collected by these new entities would not be protected or necessarily confidential. Rather, Senate staff believe in reading the bill introduced and negotiated by Sen. Chris Dodd, data collected by the offices could be shared with other government agencies, including executive branch agencies such as the IRS.

That’s right, the infamously corrupt Chris Dodd will be helping himself to your financial data. But you can trust him; he’s from the government, and he’s here to help.

The New American observes:

Czarist Russia is looking better and better. Once a byword for bureaucratic absolutism, the apparatchiks of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and their endless rule-making seem positively enlightened beside some of the pieces of aptly named omnibus legislation emanating from Capitol Hill these days.

Nobody will be unaffected by this latest foray into federal micromanagement of the private lives of Americans. Among other things, the new bill will give vast new powers to the Federal Reserve, the secretive central bank that, more than any other single entity, has been responsible both for modern asset bubbles and the recessions and depressions that have followed them. Yet instead of being held to account for its role in creating the ongoing crisis, the Fed will now be responsible for overseeing large, interconnected financial concerns deemed large enough to pose a significant threat to the financial system should they fail. It will be the task of a separate 10-person council of regulators led by the Treasury Secretary to identify such concerns on behalf of the Fed.

Tellingly, the bill has nothing to say about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two quasi-government agencies deeply complicit in the subprime fiasco. The market meltdown has been consistently portrayed by Washington insiders as a failure of the free markets, not of government. It is therefore freedom, not government, that is erroneously held to account by Dodd-Frank.

Financial “reform” bill passes, despite alarming privacy infringements

Financial Reform’s Empty Promises

Finance bill favors interests of unions, activists

New Financial Reform Bill is Unconstitutional

As Finance Bill Passes, GOP Calls for Repeal

Another Big Government “fix” for a problem that isn’t.   The motto with this administration seems to be, “if it ain’t broke, fix it until it is!”   Want to hazard a guess how long it’ll be “voluntary”?

From TG Daily:

US Cybersecurity Czar Howard Schmidt has proposed the creation of an online “identity ecosystem” to secure financial transactions in cyberspace.


The ecosystem – which was outlined in the Obama administration’s (draft) National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) – also envisions the “voluntary” use of smart identity cards for authentication purposes.

“[The] Identity Ecosystem [would allow] individuals and organizations to complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on,” Schmidt explained in an official blog post.

“No longer [will] individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services.”

According to Schmidt, the identity ecosystem would “enable a future” where individuals “voluntarily” choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc) to authenticate themselves for various types of online transactions.

Uncle Sam Wants You to Have an Online ID

Internet ‘Kill Switch’ Approved By Senate Homeland Security Committee

Bill Would Grant President Unprecedented Cyber-security Powers

Senate Proposal Gives President Authority Over Internet

Senate Democrats united to pass a financial regulatory bill that allows the government to collect data on any person operating in financial markets at any level, including the collection of personal transaction records from local banks, including customers’ addresses and ATM receipts.
 
The Senate voted 59-39 on Thursday to pass the bill – the chief aim of which is to more-heavily regulate the financial industry – sending it to a conference committee in the House of Representatives, where differences between the House and Senate versions will be ironed out.
 
The bill, if it becomes law, will create the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection and empower it to “gather information and activities of persons operating in consumer financial markets,” including the names and addresses of account holders, ATM and other transaction records, and the amount of money kept in each customer’s account.
 
The new bureaucracy is then allowed to “use the data on branches and [individual and personal] deposit accounts … for any purpose” and may keep all records on file for at least three years and these can be made publicly available upon request.

Read more at CNS News.com

Seattle, WA — Washingtonians from both sides of the political spectrum filed a lawsuit [on April 15th] to stop their state from monitoring, collecting and publicly disseminating information about the political activities of private citizens who do nothing more than urge their fellow citizens to take political action.  They seek to vindicate the belief that if the First Amendment protects anything, it protects the right of all Americans to speak to one another about the issues affecting their lives without having to first register with the government.

There are few things more distinctly American than grassroots political activism.  From town hall meetings and statehouse rallies to talk radio, blogs and “meet ups,” Americans are constantly finding new and innovative ways to participate in politics.  Through such activities, people can alert elected officials to constituents’ preferences, educate fellow citizens about how to make their voices heard, and even persuade the public to adopt new views.  In fact, it’s hard to imagine our system of government working without an active and engaged populace of grassroots activists.

But little-known laws existing in a majority of states threaten to strangle this kind of political participation with red tape, ensuring that the public square is occupied by only those established voices that have enough resources to overcome the immense burdens imposed by so-called “grassroots lobbying” laws.  These laws require groups to register with the state and file frequent and detailed reports about their contributions, expenditures and activities.

Under Washington’s “grassroots lobbying” law, if you urge your fellow citizens to contact government officials and spend more than the state’s arbitrarily low ceiling (only $500 in one month or $1,000 in three months), the government forces you to register with it and report your name, address, business and occupation, as well as the names and addresses of anyone with whom you are working to spread your message.  The state also demands to know the names and addresses of each person who contributes more than $25 to your efforts.

Simply put:  Even if you never talk to an elected official but spend as little as $500 merely to communicate with your neighbors and friends about state policies, you must register with, and provide information to, the government, which then proceeds to disseminate the information on the Internet.  Failure to register can lead to an investigation, significant penalties (including treble damages, the costs of the investigation and the government’s attorney’s fees), and a revocation of the ability to engage in any political activity that might qualify as “grassroots lobbying.”

Read more at Institute for Justice

In a move that will stoke a battle over the future of the Internet, the federal government plans to propose regulating broadband lines under decades-old rules designed for traditional phone networks.

The decision, by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, is likely to trigger a vigorous lobbying battle, arraying big phone and cable companies and their allies on Capitol Hill against Silicon Valley giants and consumer advocates.

Breaking a deadlock within his agency, Mr. Genachowski is expected Thursday to outline his plan for regulating broadband lines. He wants to adopt “net neutrality” rules that require Internet providers like Comcast Corp. and AT&T Inc. to treat all traffic equally, and not to slow or block access to websites.

At stake is how far the FCC can go to dictate the way Internet providers manage traffic on their multibillion-dollar networks. For the past decade or so, the FCC has maintained a mostly hands-off approach to Internet regulation.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Shutting Down Free Speech

Tyranny vs. the Internet

FCC plans to circumvent court ruling against internet takeover by classifying web as “public utility”

Stop a Washington takeover of the Internet

Net neutrality: Don’t subject the Internet to politicians and bureaucracies

A little noticed section (Section 152, page 63) of the Obama administration’s Financial Reform bill would create a new 1,000-employee office within the Department of the Treasury, the Office of Financial Research, which is raising alarm bells among Senate GOP staff, who say the entity would have broad powers to invade the privacy of American citizens and monitor their finances and financial activity at a level never before allowed by the federal government.

The OFR is a companion entity to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which is also proposed in the legislation (section 1001, page 1030).

Under the bill’s current language, according the Senate Banking Committee sources, the OFR under the new federal law would be allowed to collect any financial data it chooses, whether from individual citizens or businesses. Under the language of the bill, the data center can collect and maintain “all data necessary” to monitor the financial system. Wall Street executives are also concerned, because of the kind of “competitive intelligence” such an entity could collect.

“In real time, this office could be monitoring how an investment bank creates sole purpose entities and moves funding around for deal-making, real estate purchases, that kind of thing,” says an executive with J.P. Morgan Chase. “That’s not the kind of information anyone would want to have being shared, particularly if the government could in some way be a competitor. And the way things are going with financial institutions, that’s increasingly a real possibility.”

“As we read this legislation, the CFPB could mine for whatever data they want, bank card activities of a subset of American citizens, credit card debt and payment patterns, who is spending money on whatever,” says a Senate committee source. “And if the business community isn’t already scared out of their minds, they should be.”

Read more at the American Spectator

Wednesday–less than two weeks after a court decision exposing that the Federal Communications Commission has no legal authority to regulate the Internet–the FCC is scheduled to temporarily shelve its regulatory agenda to begin work on other aspects of its National Broadband Plan. This official event aside, Washington is abuzz over whether the FCC will attempt to manufacture regulatory authority over broadband Internet.

The most likely strategy? Rewrite history.

Advocates of heavy regulatory control over the Internet seem to have proposed just that. According to this revised history, policymakers regulated the Internet until the last administration turned it over to corporate controllers. Susan Crawford–former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation policy–says that “under the Bush administration the FCC deregulated high-speed Internet.” But the truth is nearly precisely the opposite.

Broadband Internet service has never been regulated like old-fashioned telephone lines.

Read more at Forbes

Yahoo and federal prosecutors in Colorado are embroiled in a privacy battle that’s testing whether the Constitution’s warrant requirements apply to Americans’ e-mail.

The  legal dust-up, unsealed late Tuesday, concerns a 1986 law that already allows the government to obtain a suspect’s e-mail from an ISP or webmail provider without a probable-cause warrant, once it’s been stored for 180 days or more. The government now contends it can get e-mail under 180-days old if that e-mail has been read by the owner, and the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply.

Yahoo is challenging the government’s position and defying a court order to turn over some customer e-mail to the feds. Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology and other groups late Tuesday told the federal judge presiding over the case that accessing e-mail under 180 days old requires a valid warrant under the Fourth Amendment, regardless of whether it has been read.

“The government says the Fourth Amendment does not protect these e-mails,” Kevin Bankston, an EFF lawyer, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “What we’re talking about is archives of our personal correspondence that they would need a warrant to get from your computer but not from the server.”

Read more at Wired