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TSA has never heard of the occupy movement...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinio...olumn/5759933/
America's ruling class has been experiencing more pushback than usual lately. It just might be a harbinger of things to come.
First, in response to widespread protests last week, the Department of Homeland Security canceled plans to build a nationwide license plate database. Many local police departments already use license-plate readers that track every car as it passes traffic signals or pole-mounted cameras. Specially equipped police cars even track cars parked on the street or even in driveways.
The DHS put out a bid request for a system that would have gone national, letting the federal government track millions of people's comings and goings just as it tracks data about every phone call we make. But the proposal was suddenly withdrawn last week, with the unconvincing explanation that it was all a mistake. I'm inclined to agree with TechDirt's Tim Cushing, who wrote: "The most plausible explanation is that someone up top at the DHS or ICE suddenly realized that publicly calling for bids on a nationwide surveillance system while nationwide surveillance systems are being hotly debated was ... a horrible idea."
On Friday, after more public outrage, the Federal Communications Commission withdrew a plan to "monitor" news coverage at not only broadcast stations, but also at print publications that the FCC has no authority to regulate. The "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs," or CIN (pronounced "sin") involved the FCC sending people to question reporters and editors about why they chose to run particular stories. Many folks in and out of the media found it Orwellian.
How this program appeared was, like the DHS program, a bit of a mystery: FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said: "This has never been put to an FCC vote; it was just announced." But the blowback was sufficient to stop it for now.
Meanwhile, in Connecticut a massive new gun-registration scheme is also facing civil disobedience. As J.D. Tuccille reports: "Three years ago, the Connecticut legislature estimated there were 372,000 rifles in the state of the sort that might be classified as 'assault weapons,' and 2 million plus high-capacity magazines. ... But by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for 'assault weapon' registrations, and 38,000 applications for magazines."
This is more "Irish Democracy," passive resistance to government overreach. The Hartford (Conn.) Courant is demanding that the state use background-check records to prosecute those who haven't registered, but the state doesn't have the resources and it's doubtful juries would convict ordinary, law-abiding people for failure to file some paperwork.
Though people have taken to the streets from Egypt, to Ukraine, to Venezuela to Thailand, many have wondered whether Americans would ever resist the increasing encroachments on their freedom. I think they've begun.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself
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From the thread where I found the OP. Interesting to say the least. I'm glad I'll be dead and gone before it gets too crazy, I hope.
"My company (no NDA on this, not ITAR) just got $1.5MM from the Feds to do R&D on software algorithms to do predictive analysis on "potential events" by, among other things, crawling social media and looking for not only key words but also any type of "unstructured or structured data" that indicates where people are. In other words, you're at a protest and you tweet a picture from the Denver state capitol building. We have a drone that flies over and sees a crowd forming. Our software then searches websites, blog posts, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and anywhere else, looking for pictures recently posted that are geo-tagged with those coordinates (in any format - lat/lon, MGRS, UTM, whatever) *or* include text references to the location, the cross-streets, pretty much anything that correlates to it. Now we know who's there. Use a burner phone? No problem - we can analysis who retweets or reposts the pics and then cross-reference their friends list to get a best-guess estimate of who they have in common who might be the original poster.
Another division of our parent company gave us a presentation last week that showed how they are now rolling out software that extracts data from the nation's network of traffic cameras. Ostensibly for determining the safety of road conditions during "weather incidents", even the lamest, lowest-resolution traffic cam can provide adequate data for their software to analysis road temp, wetness, precipitation. It can also remove vehicles from the scene - but their demo mentioned in passing that they've gotten things so clean that they can not only identify a shape as "a vehicle", they can accurately identify make and model and the vehicle. They're also starting to sell an easy-to-install sensor that citizens can mount on their vehicle to collect roadway data to improve the algorithms - essentially turning everyone into a rolling data-gathering network. Oh - and they have a social media crawler as well, "so if a bunch of people tweet each other to complain about a traffic tie-up, we pick up on that interest level and analyze camera data from that spot."
TSA has never heard of the occupy movement...
gun fullator TSA's very few friends seems to be getting more fringe
Extremist Groups Declining, But Are ‘Leaner And Meaner,’
The number of far-right militias, extremist patriot groups and hate organizations in the U.S. dropped last year for the first time since 1999, but the organizations are becoming “leaner and meaner,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reported Tuesday.
The center attributed the drop to, among other factors, an improving economy and a gridlocked Congress that made little progress on flash point issues like gun control and immigration.
The absorption of some radical-right ideas into mainstream legislative proposals also helped cut down on the number of far-right groups operating in the U.S. to about 2,035 in 2013, the civil rights advocacy group said. That’s down 14 percent from 2,367 in 2012.
Though the drop appears “to have taken some of the wind out of the sails of the radical right,” the center warned in its latest report that violence and terrorism had not “dampened” among extremist groups.
“The radical right is growing leaner and meaner,” Mark Potok, senior fellow at the center, said in a statement. “The numbers are down somewhat, but the potential for violence remains high.”
http://www.nationalmemo.com/extremist-groups-declining-leaner-meaner-watchdog-says/
Will TSA be one of the shooters?
Are you so simple minded that you lump all gun owners with extreme right wing groups?gun fullator TSA's very few friends seems to be getting more fringe
Extremist Groups Declining, But Are ‘Leaner And Meaner,’
The number of far-right militias, extremist patriot groups and hate organizations in the U.S. dropped last year for the first time since 1999, but the organizations are becoming “leaner and meaner,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reported Tuesday.
The center attributed the drop to, among other factors, an improving economy and a gridlocked Congress that made little progress on flash point issues like gun control and immigration.
The absorption of some radical-right ideas into mainstream legislative proposals also helped cut down on the number of far-right groups operating in the U.S. to about 2,035 in 2013, the civil rights advocacy group said. That’s down 14 percent from 2,367 in 2012.
Though the drop appears “to have taken some of the wind out of the sails of the radical right,” the center warned in its latest report that violence and terrorism had not “dampened” among extremist groups.
“The radical right is growing leaner and meaner,” Mark Potok, senior fellow at the center, said in a statement. “The numbers are down somewhat, but the potential for violence remains high.”
http://www.nationalmemo.com/extremist-groups-declining-leaner-meaner-watchdog-says/
Will TSA be one of the shooters?
hard to tell, when the average gun owner has 9+ guns, whether the gun is mentally ill or not. Add in old white fat rural "Christian", red-state less bubbas, the gun owner as pissed off extremist becomes clearer.
I don't know about Boots, but I bet your avatar makes you rise up against your underwear.
That gun adds some rigidity I imagine. Personally, I'll stick with/to the breasteses
Collectors tend to gather items they collect.
I am possibly stating the obvious.
gun fullator TSA's very few friends seems to be getting more fringe
Extremist Groups Declining, But Are ‘Leaner And Meaner,’
The number of far-right militias, extremist patriot groups and hate organizations in the U.S. dropped last year for the first time since 1999, but the organizations are becoming “leaner and meaner,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reported Tuesday.
Robert "Exalted Cyclops" Byrd (Dem. congressman from 1953 to 2010)
i.e. public bowel movements and jazz hands
So now the average gun owner is an extremist?
thoughts on this....
that's all??the average gun owner has 9+ guns
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