World News(Stuff to Discuss) Free For All

[Predator24]

Big Brother is coming to get you!!


U.S. Web-Tracking Plan Stirs Privacy Fears

By Spencer S. Hsu and Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 11, 2009



The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with "cookies" and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups.

A two-week public comment period ended Monday on a proposal by the White House Office of Management and Budget to end a ban on federal Internet sites using such technologies and replace it with other privacy safeguards. The current prohibition, in place since 2000, can be waived if an agency head cites a "compelling need."

Supporters of a change say social networking and similar services, which often take advantage of the tracking technologies, have transformed how people communicate over the Internet, and Obama's aides say those services can make government more transparent and increase public involvement.

Some privacy groups say the proposal amounts to a "massive" and unexplained shift in government policy. In a statement Monday, American Civil Liberties Union spokesman Michael Macleod-Ball said the move could "allow the mass collection of personal information of every user of a federal government website."

Even groups that support updating the policy question whether the administration is seeking changes at the request of private companies, such as online search giant Google, as the industry's economic clout and influence in Washington have grown rapidly.

Two prominent technology policy advocacy groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Electronic Frontier Foundation, cited the terms of a Feb. 19 contract with Google, in which a unnamed federal agency explicitly carved out an exemption from the ban so that the agency could use Google's YouTube video player.

Contract Terms

The terms of the contract, negotiated through the General Services Administration, "expressly waives those rules or guidelines as they may apply to Google." The contract was obtained by EPIC through a Freedom of Information Act request.

"Our primary concern is that the GSA has failed to protect the privacy rights of U.S. citizens," EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg said. "The expectation is they should be complying with the government regulations, not that the government should change its regulations to accommodate these companies."

Cindy Cohn, legal director for Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the contract "troubling."

"It appears that these companies are forcing the government to lower the privacy protections that the government had promised the American people," Cohn said. "The government should be requiring companies to raise the level of privacy protection if they want government contracts."

The episode recalls a dispute in January when critics complained that a redesigned White House Web site featured embedded Google YouTube videos -- depicting events such as the president's weekly address -- that used tracking cookies. The White House and Google later reassured users that they had stopped collecting data.

But the current ban on cookies, according to senior OMB officials, applies only to federal agencies and not third parties. That means that a visitor to http://www.whitehouse.gov, for example, isn't tracked by the government, but information about a user who clicks on a YouTube video on the site could be tracked by Google, according to a source at the company with knowledge of the partnership with the Obama administration.

Google spokeswoman Christine Chen directed broader questions to the government, but said in a statement that the White House use of YouTube "is just one example of how government and citizens communicate more effectively online, and we are proud of having worked closely with the White House to provide privacy protections for users."

GSA and White House officials would not answer questions, releasing only a statement by OMB spokesman Kenneth Baer that said the administration is committed to protecting users' privacy. "That is why when we asked for public comment on a new cookie policy, we specifically identified privacy considerations as a main area of focus," Baer wrote.

In a May 28 letter responding to EPIC's public records request, Zachariah I. Miller, a GSA presidential management fellow, said "...GSA and the rest of the Government do take personal privacy seriously and apply all existing privacy statutes and regulations in this area."

Similar to Online Stores

Vivek Kundra, the government's chief information officer, and OMB official Michael Fitzpatrick, wrote in a July 24 blog posting that the policy review is intended to improve customer service by allowing agencies to analyze how people use their sites and to remember individual visitors' "data, settings or preferences." Such use is similar to online stores' creation of personalized "shopping cart" services that have won wide public acceptance.

The pair proposed that if the change is made, visitors be clearly notified that tracking technologies are being used and allow them to opt out without penalty. For technologies that track users over more than a single Internet session, known as "persistent identifiers," there would be higher levels of privacy safeguards, they said.

EFF and another group, the Center for Democracy and Technology, have said that the time has come to expand privacy safeguards to new tracking technologies. At the same time, they say that the cookie ban might be too broad, keeping the government from improving its services for the public.

[Predator24]

China jails "Sexting" cell users

China mobile users face jail for sexy texts

Aug 11 05:20 AM US/Eastern

Mobile phone users in central China could face jail for sending unwanted erotic text messages while in the north, one local Communist Party branch has held 480 meetings on the problem in the past month.
Henan province has announced that firing off just one such message could see the sender slapped in detention for up to five days, the China Daily reported on Tuesday.

Three messages could result in 10 days behind bars and a fine of 500 yuan (73 dollars), the English-language newspaper reported.


The province's legal office announced the new penalties to address the growing problem of unwanted and inappropriate text messages in a country with more than 600 million mobile phone users, it said.

"I'm totally for the rules. It's uncomfortable to get dirty text messages from male friends and even more gross when they are from strangers," Zhang Kai, 26, told the daily.

"But I'll take them as jokes and reply if they are from my female friends," said Zhang, whose gender was not given.

Henan is not the first province to tackle the problem. Liaoning in the northeast passed a regulation earlier this year that such messages could be part of a sexual harassment charge, the paper said.

In a similar move, Communist Party members in Shenze county, in Hebei province, will be punished for sending text messages with "inappropriate" content, the People's Daily said.

"Obscene information not only harms the people's soul but harms the people's morality as well," it quoted the party rule as saying.

Offenders would face an unspecified punishment and the worst ones would be named and shamed in the media.

Since July 10, Shenze party officials have held 480 meetings to discuss the harmful effects of obscene messages, a degree of dedication that has been questioned by the public, the People's Daily said.

"It's not necessary to hold 480 meetings on this. This is an enormous waste of administrative resources," an Internet user named Han Haoyue was quoted as saying.

[Predator24]

Police blame internet for increase of rapes

Posted on Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Charlotte police blame the Internet for rise in rape cases

By Christsopher D. Kirkpatrick | Charlotte Observer
CHARLOTTE ? Reported rape is up 16 percent in Mecklenburg County this year, fueled by the popularity of Internet dating and online classifieds offering sexual services, Charlotte police and experts say.

In the past, (rapists) would have to hunt and stalk,? said Sgt. Darrell Price, who's in charge of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department's sexual assault unit. ?Now, all you have to do is (get on the Internet), and she's waiting for you at a hotel room.?

Officials also say a higher percentage of victims each year are coming forward to report rape. Nationally, the number of rapes reported to police has increased by 30 percent since 1993, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Greater media coverage, including attention from Oprah Winfrey, is lessening the shame and social stigma of being a victim, says Brandy Redmile Stephens, victim services director for Charlotte's United Family Services. The nonprofit has been seeing more victims lately, but she couldn't say how many more.

It's getting easier for them to understand that it's not something they should keep a secret,? she said. ?They're more informed.?

In North Carolina, a new state law that passed this year allows victims to provide medical evidence anonymously and free before deciding if they want to call police. To be effective, medical evidence needs to be collected within 72 hours of an assault.

In the past, victims without medical insurance might have paid $800 or more for an ambulance, emergency room and for a doctor or nurse to collect the evidence, Stephens estimated. The state-run N.C. Rape Victims Assistance Program now reimburses a medical staff up to $1,000.

Medical professionals also used to require the victim to report the rape to police before they would collect evidence. So victims who had financial concerns or were too traumatized missed their chance to provide forensic evidence and regretted it later, Price said. Now, they can decide later if they want to file a police report and still preserve evidence, he said.

?It gives the victim much more power,? he said.

Read the full story at CharlotteObserver.com.

[MrGoutHimself]

That's just awesome, I love when the Charlotte area gives all of us NC residents a good name. Between this and that crazy dumb blond on Big Brother, the world is going to think we're the host of the remake of Deliverance.
-SRD

[Five Inch Taint]

MUNICH, Germany (AFP) ? A court jailed a 90-year-old former German army commander for life Tuesday for ordering a massacre of Italian civilians in 1944, in one of Germany's last major Nazi war crimes trials.

The court in the southern city of Munich convicted Josef Scheungraber for the murder of 10 people in a mass killing that ultimately claimed the lives of 14 villagers in Falzano di Cortona in Tuscany.

Descendants of the victims sat in the courtroom as the verdict was read, embracing and brushing back each other's tears as they heard the sentence.

The Nazi troops gunned down a 74-year-old woman and three men in the street on June 26, 1944, with Allied troops just a few kilometres (miles) away.

The soldiers then forced 11 males aged between 15 and 66 into the ground floor of a farmhouse which they then blew up.

Only the youngest, Gino Massetti, survived, but with serious injuries. Six decades later and an old man himself, Massetti testified during a previous trial in Italy.

"Josef Scheungraber was the only officer in the company" of soldiers who carried out the murders in retaliation for an attack by Italian partisans that killed two German soldiers, presiding judge Manfred Goetzl said.

Scheungraber, who was the commander of Gebirgs-Pionier-Bataillon 818, a mountain infantry battalion, had been charged with 14 counts of murder and one of attempted murder.

He was convicted of 10 murders -- for the killings in the farmhouse -- but acquitted over the shootings due to a lack of evidence.

"They were without any doubt civilians, farmers and the sons of farmers," Goetzl said, adding that the German soldiers had been driven by "vengeance, hate and rage against partisans who killed two of their soldiers."

Scheungraber, dressed in a traditional Bavarian jacket, is hard of hearing and walks with a cane but appeared alert and in good health as he listened to the verdict against him.

"This is a very important judgement for our families and for our loved ones who cannot be here," said Angiola Lescai, 60, who lost a grandfather and an uncle in the massacre.

"It also sends a message for the future -- that certain things must not be allowed to happen and in the end, when they do, someone bears personal responsibility."

"For 65 years, we have been waiting for truth and justice," Mayor Andrea Vignini said earlier, adding that many of the victims' families had moved away from the town because they could not bear the memories of the massacre.

The prosecution had demanded a life sentence for Scheungraber, who had spent the decades since the war in the sleepy Bavarian town of Ottobrunn, running a woodworking shop and taking part in marches in memory of fallen Nazi soldiers.

His defence attorneys called for his acquittal, citing contradictions in witness testimony 65 years on.

They said they would appeal the sentence, which will likely only be heard next year. Until then, Scheuengraber will remain a free man.

The chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff, underlined the importance of such trials, even decades after the war.

"The victims of Falzano di Cortona are just as deserving today that their killers be punished as they were in 1944," he said in a statement.

Scheungraber had pleaded his innocence throughout the 11-month trial, telling the Munich court that he handed the 11 males over to the military police, after which he "never heard what happened to them".

He had been sentenced in absentia in September 2006 to life imprisonment by an Italian military tribunal in La Spezia.

The La Spezia court has tried several former Nazis in absentia but none had been brought to justice, with Germany as a rule not extraditing its citizens without their consent.

His trial was expected to be one of the last cases in Germany dealing with atrocities of the Nazi era.

One other case pending is that of John Demjanjuk, a 89-year-old Nazi death camp guard deported in May from the United States who has been charged with accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews.

Last month he was declared fit to stand trial.

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[Predator24]

How is this hurting anyone???



Suit: Women's clothes cost him job.
Thomas said that she was forced to send Brant home one day because he was wearing ?Daisy Dukes.? ?Go home, I told him. But I didn?t fire him then,? she said. Brant denies ever wearing Daisy Dukes. ?The same clothing that I wore when I was hired, was the clothes they complained about,? he said.

PHILADELPHIA. Daniel Brant wears women?s clothes because he says they better show off his feminine features.

?I think if you?re a masculine man and you have nice arms, then you wear a tight shirt and emphasize your arms,? he said.

He wore high heels when he cut hair at the Chop Shop salon on the campus of Temple University because ?when you?re cutting someone?s hair you need to reach the top of their head."

But according to a federal discrimination lawsuit the 25-year-old filed late last month, he was fired from the salon for dressing in women?s clothes. Brant says in the suit that the salon stopped sending male clients to him because he was ?too flamboyant? and that he was cut from five days a week to one after he was sent to work at the salon?s location on South Street.

?It really got to a point that I really had no choice,? he said of the suit. ?You can?t treat people like that in the workplace ever. This was something that was completely unfair.?

The salon?s owner, Kathy Thomas, refutes Brant?s claims, saying that he was fired after he referred a client looking to get her eyebrows waxed to another shop. Both Brant and Thomas said that Chop Shop?s wax station was closed that day.

"That's why he was fired," she said. "His story sounds good and newsworthy, but this has nothing to do with how he dressed."

[Predator24]

It's like letting Al Queda off the bus on Main St. Des Moines, Iowa.

Officials see rise in militia groups across US

Aug 12 12:09 AM US/Eastern
By EILEEN SULLIVAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Militia groups with gripes against the government are regrouping across the country and could grow rapidly, according to an organization that tracks such trends.
The stress of a poor economy and a liberal administration led by a black president are among the causes for the recent rise, the report from the Southern Poverty Law Center says. Conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest are also growing amid the public debate about illegal immigration.


Bart McEntire, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told SPLC researchers that this is the most growth he's seen in more than a decade.

"All it's lacking is a spark," McEntire said in the report.

It's reminiscent of what was seen in the 1990s?right-wing militias, people ideologically against paying taxes and so-called "sovereign citizens" are popping up in large numbers, according to the report to be released Wednesday. The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights group that, among other activities, investigates hate groups.

Last October, someone from the Ohio Militia posted a recruiting video on YouTube, billed as a "wake-up call" for America. It's been viewed more than 60,000 times.

"Things are bad, things are real bad, and it's going to be a lot worse," said the man on the video, who did not give his name. "Our country is in peril."

The man is holding an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, and he encourages viewers to buy one.

While anti-government sentiment has been on the rise over the last two years, there aren't as many threats and violent acts at this point as there were in the 1990s, according to the report. That movement bore the likes of Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people.

But McEntire fears it's only a matter of time.

These militias are concentrated in the Midwest, Pacific Northwest and the Deep South, according to Mark Potok, an SPLC staff director who co-wrote the report. Recruiting videos and other outreach on the Internet are on the rise, he said, and researchers from his center found at least 50 new groups in the last few months.

The militia movement of the 1990s gained traction with growing concerns about gun control, environmental laws and anything perceived as liberal government meddling.

The spark for that movement came in 1992 with an FBI standoff with white separatist Randall Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Weaver's wife and son were killed by an FBI sniper. And in 1993, a 52-day standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, resulted in nearly 80 deaths. These events rallied more people who became convinced that the government would murder its own citizens to promote its liberal agenda.

Now officials are seeing a new generation of activists, according to the report. The law center spotlights Edward Koernke, a Michigan man who hosts an Internet radio show about militias. His father, Mark, was a major figure in the 1990s militia movement and served six years in prison for charges including assaulting police.

Last year, officials warned about an increase in activity from militias in a five-year threat projection by the Homeland Security Department.

"White supremacists and militias are more violent and thus more likely to conduct mass-casualty attacks on the scale of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing," the threat projection said.

A series of domestic terrorism incidents over the past year have not been directly tied to organized militias, but the rhetoric behind some of the crimes are similar with that of the militia movement. For instance, the man charged with the April killings of three Pittsburgh police officers posted some of his views online. Richard Andrew Poplawski wrote that U.S. troops could be used against American citizens, and he thinks a gun ban could be coming.

The FBI's assistant director for counterterrorism, Michael Heimbach, said that law enforcement officials need to identify people who go beyond hateful rhetoric and decide to commit violent acts and crimes. Heimbach said one of the bigger challenges is identifying the lone-wolf offenders.

One alleged example of a lone-wolf offender is the 88-year-old man charged in the June shooting death of a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

___

[Snadoosh]

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Not that secret but whatever

[Predator24]

SI Burkini Issue




Paris pool bans Muslim woman in 'burqini' swimsuit

Aug 12 09:13 AM US/Eastern
Paris pool bans Muslim woman in 'burqini' swimsuit

A Paris swimming pool has refused entry to a young Muslim woman wearing a "burqini," a swimsuit that covers most of the body, officials said Wednesday.
The pool ban came as French lawmakers conduct hearings on whether to ban the burqa after President Nicolas Sarkozy said the head-to-toe veil was "not welcome" in secular France.

Officials in the Paris suburb of Emerainville said they let the woman swim in the pool in July wearing the "burqini," designed for Muslim women who want to swim without revealing their bodies.


But when she returned in August they decided to apply hygiene rules and told her she could not swim if she insisted on wearing the garment, which resembles a wetsuit with built-in hood.

Pool staff "reminded her of the rules that apply in all (public) swimming pools which forbid swimming while clothed," said Daniel Guillaume, an official with the pool management.

Le Parisien newspaper said the woman, identified by her first name Carole, was a French convert to Islam and that she was determined to go to the courts to challenge the decision.

"Quite simply, this is segregation," the paper quoted her as saying. "I will fight to try to change things. And if I see that the battle is lost, I cannot rule out leaving France."

The newspaper ran a photo of the woman sporting her three-piece "burqini" which she said she purchased in Dubai during a recent holiday.

"I bought it thinking that I could enjoy swimming without having to uncover myself," she said.

Local mayor Alain Kelyor said "all this has nothing to do with Islam," adding that the "burqini" was "not an Islamic swimsuit, that type of suit does not exist in the Koran," the Muslim holy book.

France, home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority, has set up a special panel of 32 lawmakers to consider whether a law should be enacted to bar Muslim women from wearing the full veil, known as a burqa or niqab.

The country has had a long-running debate on how far it is willing to go to accommodate Islam without undermining the tradition of separating church and state, enshrined in a flagship 1905 law.

The burqa debate in France has drawn chilling warnings from Al-Qaeda that it was ready to "take revenge for the honour of our daughters and sisters."

Communist MP Andre Gerin, who heads the National Assembly's burqa commission, called the "burqini" ridiculous and said pool administrators were right.

"We can't allow this. This is proof that there is a political agenda behind such dress," Gerin told Le Parisien.

[Frothy Afterbirth]

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NOOOO!!!

Could it be the same Christine Chen?