Tech at Night: Domestic Internet spying, FCC, Free Press, Henry Waxman, Net Neutrality
Hello. The longer the Democrats are in Washington, the more the mask slips with respect to their true beliefs regarding freedom online. They claim they don’t want a government takeover, they claim they don’t want to regulate content, they claim they don’t want a kill switch, they claim they want to respect privacy, but time and again all of these issues just keep coming up.
Witness the new disaster coming out of the White House which would force private firms like Facebook, Skype, and RIM to assist the government with spying on you. They are to cripple, deliberately, any safeguards they have on your privacy to make it easier for government snoops.
Remember: already nothing prevents them from listening in on the Internet. What they are demanding now is a huge expansion of power to require encryption in America to be crippled for the benefit of domestic Internet spies. Or at least, that’s the phrasing the left used throughout the Bush administration, so I’m going to throw it back in their disingenuous faces every single chance I get.
Remember when fining Janet Jackson’s breast was the worst thing going on in Washington with respect to this stuff, and how horrible that was? As the sign goes, “Miss me yet?”
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Tech at Night: FBI, Facebook, FTC, Free Speech, Apple
Good evening (it’s still Monday night for those of us in the west at least). Let’s start off tonight by remembering when Barack Obama and the democrats complained about so-called domestic spying under the Bush administration? Well, a team of organizations went after the FBI for watching possibly terrorist Islamic organizations. The FBI responded by saying they don’t need to already believe an organization is breaking the law in order to begin preliminary spying on that organization.
Now I’ll be blunt: I think this IPS news service is bunk. But it makes me laugh to remember that using modern technology to gather information about terrorists was supposedly a horrible thing when George Bush did it, but now that Barack Obama is using actual live, in-person spies you have to go to radical fringe groups to find out it’s even happening and see the progressive outrage.
Wouldn’t it be easier, safer, and more respectful of our rights just to tap the phones of foreign terrorists, than to send people into houses of worship on false pretenses?
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Tech at Night: Google, National Security Agency
Good evening. We’re now off to a good start with this new Monday-Wednesday-Friday column, because this time I’m getting it published before midnight on both coasts.
So let’s get right to it. The two big stories I’m seeing are that Google’s Street View spying troubles are coming home to the US, and the NSA is apparently expanding its mission to protect US communications from foreign agents in a new and potentially troublesome direction.
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Law and Order: Google’s Intent
It’s been a while since we peeked in at Google’s doings. The proud champion of unprecedented FCC power grabs toward Net Neutrality regulation of the Internet (for which opposition is growing in the Senate) is still under fire for two broad breaches of the public’s trust: The Andrew McLaughlin lobbying from the White House, and the massive privacy breaches in the Street View program.
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