There is a machine vending filled with live crabs in China (photo)

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

Shelly Palmer: PRISM: There Simply is No Privacy... None.

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Get Technology Alerts: Sign Up

When news broke last week that Verizon was handing over information about all of its calls to the National Security Administration, things were bad enough. In the week since then, however, things have only gotten worse for our personal security.

A program called PRISM was outed by the Washington Post. According to the top-secret document obtained by the Washington Post, the NSA and FBI have been "tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets." How big is PRISM, you ask? Massive. The document states that the collection comes "directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."

Basically, anything you've ever shared with anyone about anything on the internet has (maybe) already been seen by the government.

Scared yet?

The reason any of this information came to light in the first place is because a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA had enough. Edward Snowden decided that he "[didn't] want to live in a society that does these sort of things," so he worked with The Guardian to produce the original report. (You can also see the full court ruling of Verizon being forced to hand over telephone data here.)

With "no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," Snowden asked the Guardian to reveal his identity. The Guardian posits that Snowden will go down as one of the United States' "most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg [the Pentagon Papers] and Bradley Manning [Wikileaks]."

Snowden felt so wronged by what the government was doing that he was willing to give up the comfortable life he led with his girlfriend, which included a $200,000/year salary and a home in Hawaii, just to bring the government's privacy breaches to light. Snowden said:

"I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't, in good conscience, allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

After deciding to leak this classified information, Snowden traveled to Hong Kong - a city he believes has a "spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent." He is living in what some may call a state of paranoia, according to the Guardian: "He lines the door of his hotel room with pillows to prevent eavesdropping. He puts a large red hood over his head and laptop when entering his passwords to prevent any hidden cameras from detecting them."

President Obama has come out to defend the PRISM, saying that "every member of Congress has been briefed on the program" and that "what you've got is two programs that were originally authorized by Congress and repeatedly authorized by Congress." Obama acknowledged, "modest encroachments on privacy" and said "there are some tradeoffs involved," but that our "duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we're doing."

Essentially, as Gizmodo puts it, Obama said, "Deal with it."

As far as the companies that are implicated go, they all acted in PRPM (Public Relations Panic Mode). Several of the companies implicated in PRISM issued public statements denying all knowledge of the program, and claiming no participation.

Google's CEO Larry Page said his company has "not joined any program that would give the U.S. government--or any other government--direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday." Page called for "a more transparent approach" and said Google had "never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received--an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users' call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist."

Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg quickly followed suit, saying, "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of PRISM before [Thursday, June 6]."

These types of blanket statements led sites like TechCrunch to wonder, "If PRISM Is Real, Why Are All These Tech Companies Denying Participation?" In addition to the statements issued by Page and Zuckerberg, TechCrunch said:

"We contacted every single one of the companies implicated on these slides, though, and all of them either denied having ever heard of the program and virtually all of them claim that they would never give any government "direct access" to their servers. The one line virtually all of them use is some variation of "we do not provide the government with direct access to our servers." They all, however, say that they comply with court orders after scrutinizing the request."

When you have a top-secret government data-mining project like PRISM, which the government has acknowledged is real, yet every tech company implicated denies involvement, where do you stand? Who can you trust?

In the time since it denied any involvement in PRISM, Google announced it wants permission to disclose how many information requests it gets from federal agencies under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Google's Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, published a letter on the company's corporate blog that was written to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller, which sought clearance "to add data on FISA requests that Google receives to its Transparency Report." This would mark a significant shift in how companies like Google are able to treat FISA requests, because "under the rules of FISA, simply disclosing the fact that you've been served with a FISA request is by itself illegal. And, like so much else that's considered too secret to discuss in this matter, it's difficult to have an informed discussion about any of it if disclosure of even the most basic facts about it is illegal."

Like it did when denying involvement with PRISM in the first place, Facebook followed Google's lead and asked to disclose the information requests it receives under FISA. Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, issued a statement encouraging "all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe" and "[welcoming] the opportunity to provide a transparency report that allows us to share [...] a complete picture of the government requests we receive and how we respond."

Microsoft also issued a similar statement, asking for permission for "greater transparency on the aggregate volume and scope of national security requests" as this "would help the community understand and debate these important issues."

With the looming back-and-forth between the federal government and the companies implicated in PRISM, it doesn't seem likely that a resolution is coming any time soon.

Being an active member of a social networking community - whether it's Facebook, Twitter, or anything else - means ceding a fair amount of privacy. The information, photos and check-ins you share are already public information (to an extent), even if your security settings are maxed out. Nothing you do on the Internet is truly private, and nothing you put on the Internet will ever really be deleted. Surrendering your right to privacy is the price of living an Internet-based "connected" life.

However, when it comes to phone calls, there's an easy way to fly under the radar... use disposable cell phones. Disposable cell phones (or no contract phones, prepaid cell phones or "burners") can be purchased at just about any store that carries cell phones. Best Buy carries them, as does Walmart, Staples and more. Best Buy's site says the benefits of no-contract phones include no long-term contracts, no activation fees and no credit checks.

But, more importantly when it comes to security and privacy, prepaid cell phones will make you harder to track as they don't make you sign up for a calling plan and hand over the personal information that entails. You can pay cash for one of these phones (as well as the minutes and data you need to fill it with), and be in and out of a store without ever even showing an ID.

This isn't completely foolproof, though, as these phones' calls are generally transmitted over existing networks - prepaid phone carriers use chunks of space on existing wireless networks (including Verizon's). If your call is run through Verizon, it's still being logged - albeit without your personal information attached. And if the government really wants to keep tabs on you, they will - disposable cell phone or not.

Which begs for the question, why collect the telephone metadata of law-abiding citizens, when the "bad guys" aren't even on the grid?

I wish this issue were as simple as, "privacy" or "safety" -- pick one. It isn't. There is no sound bite or 140 character answer for this. It is a complicated issue and it needs to be discussed.

Is this the America you want to live in? You get to make the choice. Contact your elected leaders and tell them how you feel about privacy, the 4th Amendment, hunting bad guys and technology. Make yourself heard! As you know, we don't live in a democracy, we live in a Republic -- our elected leaders make our decisions for us. If you don't like the decisions... you're entitled to the peaceful transition of power on Election Day. In this case, it's all up to you.

Follow Shelly Palmer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/shellypalmer

Get Alerts

Dana Beyer: Waiting for the Supremes: There Is 'More Than Marriage' on the Equality Agenda

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Get Gay Voices Alerts: Sign Up

While we await, hunkered down and hardly breathing, the Supreme Court marriage decisions later this month, let's not forget there is more to freedom and equality than the right to marry and receive federal relationship recognition. There remain all the civil liberty and economic empowerment issues that attach to being an American citizen, whether one is gay, trans, or queer in the broadest sense, and whether or not one is in a relationship, for better or for worse.

This week there have been two campaigns focused on individual liberty, one a social media campaign #morethanmarriage to educate and inform, and to lay the groundwork for the post-SCOTUS world. The other a legal case, Howe v. Haslam brought to the Tennessee Court of Appeals, the outcome of which may have huge, broad repercussions for people across the fifty states.

There have been a number of organizations working on aspects of the LGBT civil rights campaign alongside the marriage campaigns, including some organizations such as HRC and our research and legal advocates, which try to cover most if not all of the bases, if not always at the same time. Laboring for anti-discrimination laws are, first and foremost, local and state organizations, including my Maryland organization, Gender Rights Maryland, while the only national organization dedicated to the employment discrimination issue is Freedom to Work. There have been social media campaigns, with petitions on www.change.org, and now the latest campaign, from the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco, called #morethanmarriage. While heavy on the trans rights aspect, as one would expect, it is also pushing for anti-discrimination laws to protect gender-conforming gay persons as well. The effort is to not only educate the larger American community that the LGBT community doesn't have the basic rights most Americans take for granted, and most Americans believe we already have, but to educate the gay community so they recognize that marriage equality, while very significant practically and symbolically, is not the be all and end all of equality.

In support of such broad protections, Lambda Legal has filed an amicus for a case pending in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Terveer v Billington. (The Librarian of Congress, Mr. Billington, can't seem to avoid getting into trouble). The significance of this case is that it is seeking to have sexual orientation discrimination recognized as "sex discrimination" under the law as set out in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This case parallels the efforts of Professor Feldblum of the EEOC to have the Commission recognize sexual orientation discrimination as a subset of sex discrimination, just as it already recognizes gender identity and expression discrimination as a subset of sex discrimination.

The other case, Howe v Haslan, confronts a very noxious new campaign by fundamentalist forces to overturn duly passed laws by local municipalities to protect their LGBT population. While it has been difficult to but slowly increase the number of states with comprehensive anti-discrimination laws on their books (16 states + D.C. + Puerto Rico, and 21 states with sexual orientation-only policies), there are many more local jurisdictions, over 140, which offer the same protections within uncovered states. The results of the 2010 midterm elections led to a tidal wave of Republican control of state legislatures, some of which are trying to overturn their local protections. At the forefront is Tennessee, possibly the state most hostile to the LGBT community today. The Tennessee legislature in 2011 passed HB600, nicknamed the Special Access to Discriminate ("SAD Act") by equality organizations. The state law stripped local governments of their non-discrimination laws. As the plaintiffs, including Marisa Richmond, the Tennessee Equality Project and the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition, stated, "HB600 was founded in prejudice and motivated by certain legislators' desire to punish the city of Nashville for enacting an ordinance for extending existing local protections to gay and transgender Tennesseans. As the U.S. Supreme Court has held, in a case very much like this one, "if the constitutional conception of 'equal protection of the laws' means anything, it must at the very least mean that a bare . . . desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate government interest."

I had the pleasure of befriending Nashville Councilwoman Megan Barry when we were classmates at Harvard's Kennedy School in 2008. She soon became the chief sponsor and major power pushing Nashville's comprehensive anti-discrimination ordinance, which covered the city's trans as well as gay populations. Now, following the reactionary sweep in the state in 2010, her law hangs by a thread in the court.

This case highlights the power of local government to do good, even when it takes political capital to do so, and the ever-present possibility of a reaction which can overwhelm that good when greater power is brought to bear. It is hard to believe that the court in Tennessee would ignore the judgment from Romer v Evans, but it might, and this case may end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. It bears watching, as other strongly majority Republican legislatures would jump on a bandwagon to mimic Tennessee and make life as miserable as they can for their gay and trans citizens. Pro-equality decisions from SCOTUS will do little to impede this conservative anti-freedom campaign, and might even create a backlash.

One last point -- take note of the language used by the reporter for The Tennessean, as an example of the deeply rooted bigotry coloring coverage of this case:

[...]Monday, attorney Shannon Minter with the San Francisco-based Center for Lesbian Rights told the three-judge appeals panel that there is "nothing like this in the country that specifically excludes one group of people." She called the state law "a dangerous statute that warrants some judicious scrutiny.

Shannon is a trans man, and has been for many years. There is no way anyone would mistake him for a woman. Imagine what life is like being transgender in Tennessee today.

Get Alerts

Jamie Dimon on London whale scandal: "there was no bulls * ing, period '"

JPMorgan Chase & co. (JPM). will fight "until the end" who sues the Bank for more than $6.2 billion in losses in its main Office of investment last year, said Director Executive Jamie Dimon.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

Glenn Beck: There Is A Conspiracy To Label Me A Conspiracy Theorist

Glenn Beck has a theory that there is a conspiracy to label Glenn Beck a conspiracy theorist.

Read the whole story at Salon