June 11, 2013
— Purple Avenger Oh my, Canada has been spying on its citizens too.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay approved a secret electronic eavesdropping program that scours global telephone records and Internet data trails – including those of Canadians – for patterns of suspicious activity.European spying on public (way more than anyone expected was going on at least) to be revealed in 5...4...3...2...Mr. MacKay signed a ministerial directive formally renewing the government’s “metadata” surveillance program on Nov. 21, 2011, according to records obtained by The Globe and Mail. The program had been placed on a lengthy hiatus, according to the documents, after a federal watchdog agency raised concerns that it could lead to warrantless surveillance of Canadians...
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02:20 AM
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June 10, 2013
— Maetenloch
So What Can You Find Out With Metadata?
A lot more than you think. Your social and financial interactions and internet activity pretty much define your personal world.
And if the British had been a bit more savvy in ye olde social networke theory and had a rudimentary analytical engine (or perhaps a team of mentats), it would have been dead simple to identify a Mr. Paul Revere as a critical person among the colonial rabble rousers.
And by rounding up a handful of other nodal pre-traitors they could have nipped the whole insurrection in the bud.
What a nice picture! The analytical engine has arranged everyone neatly, picking out clusters of individuals and also showing both peripheral individuals and-more intriguingly-people who seem to bridge various groups in ways that might perhaps be relevant to national security. Look at that person right in the middle there. Zoom in if you wish. He seems to bridge several groups in an unusual (though perhaps not unique) way. His name is Paul Revere.
Once again, I remind you that I know nothing of Mr Revere, or his conversations, or his habits or beliefs, his writings (if he has any) or his personal life. All I know is this bit of metadata, based on membership in some organizations. And yet my analytical engine, on the basis of absolutely the most elementary of operations in Social Networke Analysis, seems to have picked him out of our 254 names as being of unusual interest.
...At the present time, alas, the technology required to automatically collect the required information is beyond our capacity. But I say again, if a mere scribe such as I-one who knows nearly nothing-can use the very simplest of these methods to pick the name of a traitor like Paul Revere from those of two hundred and fifty four other men, using nothing but a list of memberships and a portable calculating engine, then just think what weapons we might wield in the defense of liberty one or two centuries from now.more...
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05:41 PM
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— CAC One night only: the return of the Gamma Delphinid meteors?
Guide map and some background below.
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03:13 PM
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— Ace After this debacle, Mr. Rubio will be the one "hiding in the shadows."
“Let’s be clear,” Rubio said. “Nobody is talking about preventing the legalization. The legalization is going to happen. That means the following will happen: First comes the legalization. Then come the measures to secure the border. And then comes the process of permanent residence.”
Let's be clear: I'll vote for anyone except you for President, including a Democrat.
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02:48 PM
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— Ace He'll be in minicamp tomorrow.
Belichick was recently quoted as saying he "hates" Tebow, as a player I imagine, but he denied he said such a thing. Signing him seems to prove he was misquoted.
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01:29 PM
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— Ace Sorry if that headline is a bit unfathomable. Now that I can put it into a real sentence: The IRS leaked the National Organization for Marriage's donor lists to its political opponent, Human Rights Watch. This is illegal. In fact, this is breathtakingly illegal.
NOM wants to know which IRS agent did this.
The IRS is claiming they can't tell NOM who illegally leaked confidential information, because the law forbidding the disclosure of confidential information also protects the confidentiality of those who illegally leak such information!
Astonishing.
n April 2012, the NOM asked the IRS for an investigation. The inspector general's office gave them a complaint number. Soon they were in touch. Even though the leaked document bore internal IRS markings, the inspector general decided that maybe the document came from within the NOM. The NOM demonstrated that was not true.For the next 14 months they heard nothing about an investigation. By August 2012, the NOM was filing Freedom of Information Act requests trying to find out if there was one. The IRS stonewalled. Their "latest nonresponse response," said Mr. Eastman, claimed that the law prohibiting the disclosure of confidential tax returns also prevents disclosure of information about who disclosed them. Mr. Eastman called this "Orwellian." He said that what the NOM experienced "suggests that problems at the IRS are potentially far more serious" than the targeting of conservative organizations for scrutiny.
This is one of those situations where you cannot write a joke because the joke is actually the facts of the matter. For example: here's the joke version.
NOM: I want to know who broke the law protecting confidentiality of taxpayer information.
IRS: We can't tell you that.
NOM: Why not?
IRS: The law protecting the confidentiality of taxpayer information protects the confidentiality of those who break the law of protecting the confidentiality of taxpayer information.
That's the joke version. It also happens to be the actual account of the IRS' position.
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12:44 PM
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June 11, 2013
— Ace I don't say Aaron Sorkin caused the IRS targeting-- I say his psychosis did. A psychosis shared by millions of hardcore left-liberals. Such as the president.
I keep seeing this startlingly obnoxious trailer on YouTube. And it was bothering me. There was something underlying, I thought.
First of all, watch the trailer. Don't worry. HBO isn't going to get cash-money for watching its trailer. more...
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12:49 PM
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June 10, 2013
— Ace You are entitled to have 501(c)4 status for social welfare, so long as it's the liberal version of social welfare.
AD indicates Joseph received a call from IRS Exempt Organization Specialist Sherry Wan in March 2012. Wan told her that, in order to obtain a tax exemption, “You cannot force your religion or force your beliefs on somebody else…. You have to know your boundaries. You have to know your limits. You have to respect other people’s beliefs.”“The IRS has approved applications for tax exemption for pro-abortion groups such as Planned Parenthood and Life and Liberty for Women,” ADF said.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a pro-life legal group, is now representing the affected organization (the Pro-Life Revolution). The ADF's Senior Legal counsel said:
“The IRS is a tax collector; it shouldn’t be allowed to be the speech and belief police."
Obviously. But it turns out this isn't obvious at all to the Empowered Government.
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11:56 AM
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— Ace Every bit of this con artist is contrived and false.
He then amplified this letter (signed by him, but written by someone else) by talking about civil liberties in a speech now regarded as "hilarious... perhaps the greatest comic masterpiece since A Night at the Opera--" Rex Reed, The New Yorker.
If someone wants to know why their own government has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document - through library books they've read and phone calls they've made - this legislation gives people no rights to appeal the need for such a search in a court of law. No judge will hear their plea, no jury will hear their case. This is just plain wrong.
James Rosen could not be reached for comment, but a secret government surveillance into all of his phone calls and emails says he's pretty pissed.
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11:25 AM
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— Ace A great many incidences of small-ball behavior occurred. But that is itself not the scandal. We can expect any pool of human beings to engage in vices and even crime.
The scandal is that the State Department ordered the IG to cover it up.
Bear in mind, this is the habit, the attitude, the mindset that dominated State during the Benghazi cover-up.
I'll just direct you to the article for details about the misconduct that was covered up. It includes drug use, soliciting prostitutes, and sexual abuse. But as bad as these things are, they are, the common misbehaviors of human beings.
Of course soliciting prostitutes and drugs in a foreign country is also an enormous source of compromise for US officials -- foreign intelligence services often have hookers and drug-vendors on their pad (and under their protection) in exchange for blackmail material. But usually these things can be handled -- firings, disciplinary actions, reassinging possibly compromised agents to nonsense rubber room duties.
That is, these things can be handled... unless higher-ups decide to cover-up the misbehavior entirely.
The real problem, and the real scandal, is that higher-ups ordered this investigation suppressed.
Who? We don't know. But an interesting name, one familiar to those who've followed BenghaziGate, has surfaced.
CBS News' John Miller reports that according to an internal State Department Inspector General's memo, several recent investigations were influenced, manipulated, or simply called off. The memo obtained by CBS News cited eight specific examples....
In such cases, DSS agents told the Inspector General's investigators that senior State Department officials told them to back off, a charge that Fedenisn says is "very" upsetting.
"We were very upset. We expect to see influence, but the degree to which that influence existed and how high up it went, was very disturbing," she said.
...
John Miller spoke with Mike Pohelitz, a retired Senior Agent at the DSS who was involved in one of the cases listed in the Inspector General's memo. Pohelitz said he was told to stop investigating one of the cases and that the order likely came from the upper ranks of the DSS.
"I got the information through my DS channel," he told Miller. "But it had to come from somebody higher than DS, I'm sure."
Now, in one case, Patrick Kennedy appears to have played the role of fixer, having a chat with an ambassador -- an ambassador, mind you! -- who routinely evaded his security detail in order to solicit prostitutes in a public park. This is of course an enormously compromising behavior -- and yet Patrick Kennedy just had a chin-wag with him and then instructed him to return to his post.
As ambassador. We are not talking about some minor visa-processor.
And Patrick Kennedy is a central figure in the Benghazi scandal-- one Hillary's hit-man. For example, it is suspected -- but no one will confirm -- that it was Patrick Kennedy who ordered the FEST (Foreign Emergency Service Team) to not attempt a Benghazi rescue.
The official said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy, Patrick Kennedy, quickly dispensed with the idea. A senior State Department official Thursday told CBS News, “Under Secretary Kennedy is not in the decision chain on FEST deployment” but would not directly confirm whether Kennedy or somebody else dismissed the FEST.
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10:28 AM
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