Driving Somewhere? There’s a Government Record of That
July 17th, 2013Via: AP:
Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong.
Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.
As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems. While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge’s approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver’s location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. The ACLU says the scanners assemble what it calls a “single, high-resolution image of our lives.”
Insecticide Laced Food Kills at Least 22 Children in India
July 17th, 2013Some of this food wasn’t “properly washed” and dozens of children are dead?
Via: The Star:
At least 22 children died and more than two dozen others were sick after eating a free school lunch that was tainted with insecticide, Indian officials said Wednesday.
It was not immediately clear how chemicals ended up in the food in a school in the eastern state of Bihar. One official said the food may not have been properly washed before it was cooked.
The children, between the ages of 5 and 12, fell ill Tuesday soon after eating lunch in Gandamal village in Masrakh block, 80 kilometres north of the state capital of Patna. School authorities immediately stopped serving the meal of rice, lentils, soybeans and potatoes as the children started vomiting.
Savita, a 12-year-old student who uses only one name, said she had a stomach ache after eating soybeans and potatoes and started vomiting.
“I don’t know what happened after that,” Savita said in an interview at Patna Medical College Hospital, where she and many other children were recovering.
Millions of Americans Living Abroad: Get Ready to Comply with New and Absurd U.S. Tax Rules or Give Up Citizenship
July 17th, 2013Via: Wall Street Journal:
Beware the sledgehammer used to crack the nut. In this case, the nut is the U.S. government’s laudable goal of catching tax evaders. The sledgehammer is the overreaching effect of legislation that is alienating other countries and resulting in millions of U.S. citizens abroad being forced to either painfully reconsider their nationality, or face a lifetime of onerous bureaucracy, expense and privacy invasion.
The legislation is Fatca, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. To appreciate its breathtaking scope along with America’s unique “citizen-based” tax practices, imagine this: You were born in California, moved to New York for education or work, fell in love, married and had children. Even though you have faithfully paid taxes in New York and haven’t lived in California for 25 years, suppose California law required that you also file your taxes there because you were born there. Though you may never have held a bank account in California, you must report all of your financial holdings to the State of California. Are you a signatory on your spouse’s account? Then you must declare his bank accounts too. Your children, now adults, have never been west of the Mississippi but they too must file their taxes in both California and New York and report any bank accounts they or their spouses may have because they are considered Californians by virtue of one parent’s birthplace.
Extrapolate that example to the six million U.S. citizens living around the globe. Many, if not most, don’t know about these requirements. Yet they face fines, penalties and interest for not complying—even if they owe no U.S. taxes, own no U.S. property, have no U.S. bank account and haven’t lived there in years—if ever.
A particularly alarming aspect of Fatca is that it seeks to co-opt foreign banks as long-arm enforcement agencies of the Internal Revenue Service—even when it might contravene that country’s own privacy or data-protection laws. If financial institutions don’t report U.S. citizens holding accounts with them, these institutions face a 30% withholding tax on securities transactions that originate in the U.S.
Given this threat, why allow an American, or even suspected American, to bank with you? The reporting costs, and the consequences of a mistake, are too onerous.
Michael Hastings’ Body Cremated Against Wishes of Family Members
July 17th, 2013Update: Reporter Misquoting Joe Biggs
This was sent in by TB. Thanks TB.
Via: Twitter:
colleen menzies ?@colleenmenzies 17 Jul
Something Fishy @Rambobiggs @peterjludlow: So Hastings’ body is cremated without the family’s consent. wow.just wow. http://www.sandiego6.com/story/hastings-investigation-20130714 …”
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SSG Joe Biggs ?@Rambobiggs
@colleenmenzies @peterjludlow nope. Not true. Never said that
NomNomDePlume ‘Agent’ Lamo JT aka. Kûšh Må?t?r 13 12 1 /\ 1\1
5:10 AM – 17 Jul 13
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Reply to @Rambobiggs @colleenmenzies @peterjludlow
colleen menzies ?@colleenmenzies 17 Jul
@Rambobiggs @peterjludlow So that online interview Is incorrect ?
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SSG Joe Biggs ?@Rambobiggs 17 Jul
@colleenmenzies @peterjludlow I said it was weird being at a funeral and the body is missing. You know. Not there. Because it was in LA
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SSG Joe Biggs ?@Rambobiggs 17 Jul
@colleenmenzies @peterjludlow and that the remains were cremated. I also said I wasn’t sure if that’s what Michael wanted or the family.
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colleen menzies ?@colleenmenzies 17 Jul
@Rambobiggs @peterjludlow Yes – Not good. This should all be left – so u and family Friends can grieve in private. ?
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Peter Ludlow ?@peterjludlow 17 Jul
@Rambobiggs @colleenmenzies so she misquoted you? deliberately do you think?
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SSG Joe Biggs ?@Rambobiggs 17 Jul
@peterjludlow @colleenmenzies I don’t know. But I’m not happy
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Peter Ludlow ?@peterjludlow 17 Jul
@Rambobiggs @colleenmenzies well if she deliberately misrepresented you that pretty much makes the rest of her reporting on this worthless.
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colleen menzies ?@colleenmenzies 17 Jul
@peterjludlow @Rambobiggs and its something a grieving wife family& friends dont need at this point in time.What about a code of ethics. 🙂
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SSG Joe Biggs ?@Rambobiggs 17 Jul
@peterjludlow @colleenmenzies well let’s hope it’s a misunderstanding
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SSG Joe Biggs ?@Rambobiggs 17 Jul
@colleenmenzies @peterjludlow oh I know
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Via: San Diego 6:
Details uncovered by this reporter shed new light into the June 18 death of journalist Michael Hastings.
Hastings’ friend and confidant SSgt. Joe Biggs disclosed a macabre twist in the award-winning journalist’s death in a suspicious single-car accident. According to SSgt. Biggs, “Michael Hastings’ body was returned to Vermont in an urn.” He further alleged, “Family members did not want Michael’s body cremated.”
This revelation provides another wrinkle in the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) handling of a case they labeled “no foul play” only hours after the writer’s death.
Nevertheless LA County assistant corner, Ed Winter, said it took two days to identify the burned-beyond recognition body of Hastings. Officials also confirmed that an autopsy has been performed, but the cause of death is still pending. Unfortunately the family will have to wait for cause of death answers as LAPD media spokesperson Lieutenant Andrew Neiman indicated, “It will take several weeks to get the toxicology results.”
Research Credit: ottilie
June Earnings
July 17th, 2013Total earnings in June came to $889.67.
To those who sent funds directly, thank you.
Pookie $75
Eileen $125 [!!!]
RL $20
DS $25
TB $50
Anon EUR20
TM $10
Thanks to everyone who conducted business via Cryptogon’s affiliate links. The owners of thinkanimated.com and peterbucklin.com earned Cryptogon $180 for signing up for webhosting with BlueHost.
Oh, if you’re wondering what happened to my affiliate banners and links to BlueHost, just temporarily turn off AdBlock+ and the BlueHost stuff will magically re-appear. 😉
While I missed the minimum earnings goal of $1000 this month, if I add May’s earnings ($1383.31) to June’s ($889.67) and divide by two, a two month moving average of $1136.49 looks good to me.
Thanks, again, to the handful of you out there who are keeping Cryptogon going.
Judge Demands Tech Companies Hand Activist Data Over to Chevron
July 17th, 2013Via: Grist:
Chevron is attempting to defend itself against a pesky $18 billion-plus judgment for its dirty dealing in the Ecuador rainforest. In the company’s appeal against the landmark judgment, a federal judge in New York has upheld a subpoena from Chevron seeking IP addresses and identity records of people allegedly tied to the investigation. From EarthRights International:
The sweeping subpoena was one of three issued to Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, demanding IP usage records and identity information for the holders of more than 100 email accounts, including environmental activists, journalists and attorneys. Chevron’s subpoena sought personal information about every account holder and the IP addresses associated with every login to each account over a nine-year period.
This could allow Chevron to determine the countries, states, cities or even buildings where the account-holders were checking their email so as to “infer the movements of the users over the relevant period and might permit Chevron to makes inferences about some of the user’s professional and personal relationships.”
EPA Nukes Radiation Rules
July 17th, 2013Via: EnviroReporter:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s draft EPA “Protective Action Guide” (PAG), posted on its website April 15, allows hundreds to thousands of times more radiation in disasters than the agency had previously allowed. Americans have until Monday, July 15 to comment* even though the EPA made the new PAG effective immediately.
According to EPA’s own data, the new PAGs will result in exponentially higher radiation-induced fatal cancers than the current goal of one in ten thousand to one in a million Americans.
In various exposure scenarios listed in the report, depending on which radionuclide, the resultant cancer rates would claim several out of ten, one in eight, one in six – even as low as one in 1.7.
The EPA PAG’s justification for these astronomically higher numbers is that during a disaster like a nuclear meltdown, a terrorist ‘dirty bomb,’ or a nuclear detonation, all limits currently for radiation exposure in air, water, food and soil are targets for revision.
“These PAGs are basically admitting that contamination levels could be so high from such an event that they may not be able to be cleaned up to existing standards such as the drinking water contamination levels,” says Maryland-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “Thus, EPA would permit unacceptably high radiation risks at each of the stages after nuclear disaster without even suggesting any steps to prevent or minimize the potential disasters.”
Research Credit: neverwas
Microsoft Trying to Create System That Predicts Your Physical Location in the Future
July 17th, 2013Via: Fast Company:
Would you like to know how crowded your drive to the beach will be in three weeks? Or where your ex will be on a Friday night next month so that you can avoid him?
Adam Sadilek, formerly of Microsoft, now a researcher at Google, and John Krumm, a principal researcher at Microsoft, were inspired by the question of predicting where people would be in the future and even led off with the query, “Where are you going to be 285 days from now at 2PM?” in their their paper, Far Out: Predicting Long-Term Human Mobility.
“At first glance,” the researchers told us, “it sounds like a very difficult problem.”
Japan’s Internet Cafes: Home for the Underemployed
July 16th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
Over the past 10 years, Internet cafes in Japan have become hotels for the underemployed. Many are equipped with tiny private booths, showers, and laundry service and offer reasonably priced packages for overnight users. The monthly rate at one cafe is 1,920 yen ($19) a day. In 2007, according to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, 60,900 people spent a night at an Internet cafe, and about 5,400 were living in them full time.
The Case for Abolishing the DHS
July 16th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano resigned to take up a post running California’s university system. With her departure, there are now 15 vacant positions at the top of the department. That suggests it would be a particularly humane moment to shut the whole thing down. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks. It owes its continued existence to a vastly exaggerated assessment of the threat of terrorism. The department is also responsible for some of the least cost-effective spending in the U.S. government. It’s time to admit that creating it was a mistake.
