NYPD Clashes With Twitter Over Online Massacre Threat

via: RT
August 8, 2012

Twitter has reportedly been served a subpoena on behalf of the New York Police Department after a user of the social-media site wrote that he or she was about to open fire at a Broadway theater.

The NYPD says that they’ve asked Twitter to hand over the identify of a user who sent out several tweets over the course of a few days that suggested the person behind the account was preparing to engage in a massacre on par with the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting that left a dozen moviegoers dead during the premier of the Batman: The Dark Knight Rises last month.

“This shit ain’t no joke yo- I’m serious, people are gonna die like Aurora. Gosh I’m still making this hit list damn I wanna kill a lot of people,” the user reportedly wrote in one tweet.

Beginning in late July, the Twitter user allegedly sent out a series of other tweets that included messages as explicit as “I might just shoot up this theater in new York I know they leave their exit doors unlocked.” In one dated August 2, the user responded to another tweet about former boxer Mike Tyson’s performance at the Longacre on Broadway by writing, “Well ima shoot that theater up tonight just trust me.”

The NYPD asked Twitter for the user’s identity right away, the New York Post reports, although the Silicon Valley company did not comply at first.

“We appreciate the timeliness and sensitivity of this matter and have reviewed the reported Twitter account. While we do invoke emergency-disclosure procedures when it appears that a threat is present, specific and immediate, this does not appear to fall under those strict parameters as per our policies,” Twitter told the NYPD at first.

“Twitter turned us down, so we dispatched police to cover the theater while we sought a subpoena to force Twitter to disclose the identity of the account holder,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne tells ABC News.

Continue Reading At: RT.com

Market Optimistic On Central Bank Intervention

via: ZeroHedge
by: Tyler Durden
August 7, 2012

Market Optimistic On Central Bank Intervention

Today’s AM fix was USD 1,613.00, EUR 1,300.39, and GBP 1,032.39 per ounce.
Yesterday’s AM fix was USD 1,606.75, EUR 1,299.43 and GBP 1,032.28 per ounce.

Silver is trading at $28.08/oz, €22.71/oz and £18.01/oz. Platinum is trading at $1,415.70/oz, palladium at $582.50/oz and rhodium at $1,100/oz.

Ireland observed a national holiday on Monday.

Gold climbed $8.40 or 0.52% in New York yesterday and closed at $1,611.20/oz. Silver hit a high of $27.985 and closed with a gain of 0.5%.

Continue Reading At: ZeroHedge.com

Twitter Censors User for Opinion

via: TheIntelHub
August 2, 2012

While it’s obvious that most large corporations are fronts for the illumines global criminal activity, now Twitter has censored it’s user for opinion.

The Wall Street Journal reports;

The biggest brouhaha so far erupted on Monday and Tuesday, when a finger-pointing spat emerged over a journalist getting booted off Twitter after he was critical of NBC’s Olympics coverage.

The journalist was reinstated on the short-messaging service Tuesday—but not before the blogosphere lit up with criticism over whether Twitter was curtailing free speech. Twitter apologized for what it said were its missteps in the incident.

Beyond that, two athletes have been kicked out of the Games for posting controversial statements on Twitter. At least one other athlete had been reprimanded for using social media to name their sponsors, in apparent violation of Olympics rules—and athletes have used Twitter to strike back, criticizing the IOC rules.

British diver Tom Daley also warred on Twitter this week with a critic, who was later arrested on suspicion of malicious communication and revealed to be a British teenager.

Another push by the globalists to control the populace.

Read More At: TheIntelHub.com

Twitter & Privacy – Impossible Union?

via: RTAmerica
August 2, 2012

Peak Spam

via: ZeroHedge
by: Tyler Durden
July 11, 2012

The Borg collective formerly known as the US middle class may have no money left (and its credit cards have long since been maxed out), but at least it has every internet-connected gizmo known to man and Klingon. Not surprisingly, this development has not been lost on the very same retailers who are competing dollar for dollar with the vendors who sell these same faddy gizmos to the same Borg collective. For now retailers are losing. But, like stock traders and the administration they are full of hope. And spam. And will make it known. As SM reports, spam emails from retailers “jumped 20% in the first half of the year over the same period in 2011, according to a survey released this week by Responsys, a California-based marketing software company. In June alone, these stores sent an average of 18 emails per subscriber, up 21% on last year.” Expect this number to only go up until virtually every email coming into one’s inbox is a groupon ad, a penis enlargement device, a PFG “try us for 30 days for free” offer, or a 90%-off “one time only” for the latest value investing congress. Because the only cost associated with spamming people is printing extra email lists. The Fed Chairman can vouch for the sunk cost associated with hitting CTRL+P.

Continue Reading At: ZeroHedge.com 

Court in OWS Twitter Case Gets it Wrong Again

via: ActivistPost
by: Hanni Fakhoury
Friday, July 6, 2012

Despite Twitter’s (and our) best efforts, it has been ordered to disclose to the government all of the information it has on an Occupy Wall Street protester.

We’ve been following the case of Malcolm Harris‘ — arrested in connection with the OWS Brooklyn Bridge protest in October 2011 — very closely. Charged with disorderly conduct, New York City prosecutors sent a broad subpoena to Twitter, seeking to obtain any and all information it had on Harris — tweets, subscriber information, email addresses. From the very beginning, we suspected that the government was really after location information. And sure enough, after Harris challenged the subpoena, the NYC prosecutors admitted they wanted the information to show he was on the bridge at the time of his arrest.

In April, the court denied Harris’ motion to quash, writing an opinion filled with troubling legal conclusions, finding Harris had no legal standing to challenge the subpoena since he didn’t own his tweets, and allowing the government to access content and location data without a search warrant. Thankfully, Twitter stepped up to challenge the subpoena since the court ruled Harris couldn’t do it himself, and together with the ACLU and Public Knowledge, we filed an amicus brief in support of Twitter’s motion to quash.

Continue Reading At: ActivistPost.com

RAND Collected Iranian Tweets For U.S. “National Security Agenda”

Infowars
Jurriaan Maessen
March 22, 2012

Whenever you post something, anything, on Twitter or Facebook- or any other form of “social media” for that matter- know that they will be picked up, stored and analyzed by a RAND-corporation social scientist.

In a document titled Using Social Media to Gauge Iranian Public Opinion and Mood After the 2009 Election the authors have set out to reveal their findings after having collected thousands of tweets from the Iranian people in the months following the Iranian elections of 2009. The globalist think tank complained about the shortcomings of just scanning through Iranian blogs and such. In order to assess the Iranian zeitgeist, RAND turned to an extraordinary computer-program called LIWC:

“Given the shortcomings of the manual approach, using a computerized method to study the content of social media can serve as a useful complement, compensating for some of these limitations. Such a tool exists: an automated content analysis program called “Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2007” (LIWC, pronounced “Luke”).”

“Focusing on Twitter, we used LIWC as a means of tapping into Iranian public opinion and mood during the tumultuous months following the highly controversial 2009 presidential election”, the report states.

Admitting that the probing and analyzing of Iranian tweets serves the national security interests of the United States, the RAND researchers in the same breath admit:

“Given that LIWC is largely untried in non-Western political contexts, we used Iran during this period as a test case. On the one hand, we sought to shed light on how public opinion and mood evolved after the 2009 election. But at the same time, we intended to examine the validity of a new methodology—one incorporating the LIWC tool—for analyzing foreign public sentiment on political topics, as expressed through the social media platform, Twitter.”

The results, according to the authors, are so full of promise that they seek to expand the program even further. Under the header “Expanding the Scope of the Current Work” they state:

“To extend this current work, applying the methodology to other forms of social media is an obvious next step. For instance, we have conducted initial analyses of Iranian, Persian-language blogs, and of political leaders’ Facebook postings, which are not reported here.”

The authors are aware of the implications of their research when it comes to national security “interests”:

“We could also extend the current research by looking across more than one country at a time to gauge the sentiments that social media users in each country express on topics of interest to them all.”, the report continues.

“For example, using the current methodology, it is possible to compare sentiments expressed across Iran, Pakistan, and other countries on topics including the United States, nuclear weapons, and domestic political issues. Other extensions of the current research could focus on Asian countries that are high on the national security agenda, such as China and Taiwan, or on Middle Eastern countries where political protests in early 2011 were reportedly influenced by social media use, such as Egypt and Tunisia.”

Because the methods used by RAND were retrospective in nature, the authors envision using this and other software for monitoring of international conflicts “as they unfold”:

“A final way to extend the current methodology is to build a real-time tracking tool for social media texts. Such a tool could automatically download texts as they are posted, run them through a parsing algorithm, and place them into a database for processing through LIWC (or other software). Using such a tool, it would be possible to view and analyze patterns in written texts almost as quickly as they unfold. Given the policy relevance of our findings, these recommendations for validation and extensions of the methodology illustrate the potential of analyzing social media to understand public mood and opinion in various populations of interest.”

This expanded RAND-program is no doubt already fully operational, as the new world order further tightens its grip on all of humanity.

Source: InfoWars.com

CrimePush: Yet Another Citizen Spy Application for Smartphones

The Intel Hub
By Madison Ruppert
March 6, 2012

Recently I reported on the concerted effort to bring citizen spying into the digital age with applications on smartphones which can be used to report “suspicious activity” to local homeland security fusion centers.

This has expanded even more thanks to the hard work of individuals like 25-year-old Eman Pahlevani, a student at the University of New Hampshire School of Law.

Pahlevani launched an application last month called CrimePush after several months of development with his brother and a friend.

The application allows users to send in reports in the form of text, pictures or video directly to local law enforcement after police dispatch centers set up their accounts with CrimePush.

After the dispatchers have registered, users of Android-based devices and Apple iPhones within the given area are able to download the application dedicated to that location and start sending in tips, no matter how erroneous.

Interestingly, Pahlevani claims that at least one county in every single state in the United States had expressed interest in using the application in just the first three weeks after launching it.

He said that he has been getting a great deal of support from his professors, saying, “They’ve all given me a lot of feedback of: ‘It’s going to be a game changer for people who want to report crime and get information to police.’”

While this might be true, it’s also going to be a game changer for police officers who are inundated by false reports, misleading information, maliciously submitted reports and so on.

In a question and answer session with the Concord Monitor out of Concord, New Hampshire, Pahlevani revealed that he decided to turn his idea into a mobile application to appeal to young people, or as he put it, “this generation growing up with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We thought this would be a good way to open up lines of communication between the younger generation and police authorities.”

It’s also a great way to condition people into reporting every little thing to police, especially when the federal government classifies just about everything as an indicator of possible terrorism.

Pahlevani said that users are able to choose from nine kinds of crime in the app when submitting their crime report, although it is unclear what these categories are in the article. However, I was able to locate a screenshot from the application (shown above) which shows the following categories: theft, threat, altercation, sexual abuse, medical, accident, vandalism, drugs and harassment.

He told the local news outlet that police and sheriffs across the nation have been requesting that they be integrated and they have been customizing the application for every county that has expressed interest.

Pahlevani boasted that 300-500 counties across America are trying to get integrated with them right now, but he did not say how many counties are already integrated into the system.

He said that while he is offering this to counties for free for now, this is going to become a for-profit endeavor.

After they get enough counties and police districts involved in using the application, he plans on forcing them to pay a licensing fee of $1,000 per year per county, something which he claims is “an extremely nominal fee.”

Sure, it might be nominal if one county was using it, but when you consider the fact that there are 3,141 total counties and “statistically equivalent entities” in the United States as of January 1, 1990, the “extremely nominal fee” starts to add up, although it would remain free for users.

Obviously this is not being done purely out of the kindness of their hearts, as evidenced by an advertisement (screenshot here in case it is removed) for a Vice President of Business Development offering “$65,000 – $85,000 first year commissions.”

It gets even more interesting when he brings up the possibilities that these could be used in schools, further criminalizing our children and making the public education system an even more efficient school-to-prison pipeline.

“We also are working right now with high schools and middle schools because superintendents in different counties and principals want to use this with students between periods,” Pahlevani said, “so if they go from class to class and they see a fight or they see a drug deal … they can just send it directly to school authorities.”

All of this is just intended to encourage what some might call snitching, which I prefer to call voluntary citizen spying.

The most absurd part is that there is no incentive given to the users other than the good feeling they might get from reporting what they think might be criminal activity to the “authorities.”

Furthermore, this is a massive waste of police time and resources. People could report their unfriendly neighbor or their ex-mate with whom they had a less-than-amicable break up in order to have the police kick down their door and hassle them.

I do not see any real reason for applications like this to exist. If there is an emergency or an actual crime, it would be much faster and more efficient to just call 911 directly rather than opening an application, choosing a type of crime, typing some report out or snapping a picture.

Hopefully young people won’t be silly enough to snatch this up and start accepting this type of society just because it’s a cool application on their shiny new iPhone or Android device.

Source: TheIntelHub.com

This article originally appeared on End the Lie 

ACTA in UK: 10 years in jail for a download?

UK web surfers have caught a grim glimpse of the future with Internet users being threatened with 10 years in jail for “illegal downloading” after a prominent music file-sharing site was shut down shortly after Britain signed the notorious ACTA bill.
It is the first time such a move has been made against Internet users in the UK. The British government introduced regulations in 2009 enabling Internet providers to track users who downloaded illegal content from the web and disable their connection if warning letters had no effect. But signing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has brought the conflict to a whole new level.
In Europe, people are taking to the streets in protest at the contradictory Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, with some countries refusing to sign it. After hackers from the activist group Anonymous attacked practically all US government websites in retaliation, the authorities are now considering adopting their own home-grown anti-counterfeiting laws like PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) / SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).

Source: RT.com

Document Proves DHS Is Monitoring Social Media For Government Criticism

Infowars.com
Paul Joseph Watson
Thursday, February 23, 2012

A Homeland Security training manual belies claims made by DHS representatives during a Congressional hearing last week that the federal agency is only monitoring social media outlets for “situational awareness,” and proves the fact that Bis Sis is also tracking online criticism of government, including discussion of airport body scanners.

“Analysts for a Department of Homeland Security program that monitors social networks like Twitter and Facebook have been instructed to produce reports on policy debates related to the department, a newly disclosed manual shows,”reports the New York Times.

The manual, entitledDepartment of Homeland Security National Operations Center Media Monitoring Capability Desktop Reference Binder, was obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center via a FOIA request.

The controversy over DHS spying on social media erupted last month following the release of 300 documents which detailed how DHS had hired an outside contractor, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, to monitor social media outlets along with a list of websites, on a “24/7/365 basis,” in order to uncover “any media reports that reflect adversely on the U.S. Government and the Department of Homeland Security.”

During a subsequent Congressional hearing on the matter, DHS representatives Mary Callahan and Richard Chávez denied the fact that tracking criticism of government agencies formed any part of the program, and that the effort was merely aimed at developing “situational awareness” of potential threats, mostly related to extreme weather events.

However, the 2011 manual makes it abundantly clear that the program was a backdoor effort to keep tabs on what the American people were saying about not just the DHS, but a whole host of federal agencies, including the CIA, the ATF, the TSA, FEMA, as well as organizations outside of the U.S. government such as the United Nations and the Red Cross.

The ‘items of interest’ listed in the document which require monitoring of social media include, “policy directives, debates and implementations related to DHS.”

In addition, the list of keywords the DHS is tasked with monitoring include terms that have little to do with “situational awareness.”

During last week’s hearing, Callaham claimed that such keywords were restricted to “you know, flood, tornado and things like that.” In reality, the manual also directs DHS analysts to search for terms such as “China, cops, hacking, illegal immigrants, Iran, Iraq, marijuana, organized crime, police, pork and radicals.”

The words “militia,” “riot,” “body scanner,” and “nationalist” are also included in the list of keywords the DHS is tasked with monitoring.

The fact that Homeland Security is monitoring what people say about airport body scanners, in the aftermath of a wider national basklash against the TSA as a whole, dovetails with how the TSA has subjected people who refuse to use them to undue suspicion and questioning.

“The D.H.S. continues to monitor the Internet for criticism of the government,” EPIC’s Ginger McCall said in reference to the document. “This suspicionless, overbroad monitoring quells legitimate First Amendment activity and exceeds the agency’s legal authority.”

Source: InfoWars.com