Showing posts with label information. Show all posts
Showing posts with label information. Show all posts

A Search Engine That Brings The Dark Web To Light

by Mark Stockley.      The Dark Web is reflecting a little more light these days. On Monday I wrote about Memex, DARPA's Deep Web search engine. Memex is a sophisticated tool set that has been in the hands of a few select law enforcement agencies for a year now, but it isn't available to regular users like you and me. There is another search engine  ... MORE

John Stossel - No Gatekeepers

Crowdsourcing works.   For years, people assumed encyclopedias had to be created by professionals.   Then Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales attempted to create an encyclopedia without central planners.   That sounded like a terrible idea to the old gatekeepers — people who hired experts to carefully fact-check and edit every encyclopedia    ... MORE

Healthcare.gov Shares Your Personal Data With Marketers

by Rob Hustle.    HealthCare.gov is sharing your private personal health data with over a dozen online marketing companies. These companies provide tools that allow HealthCare.gov to track, analyze and record anyone who visits the site. But, despite its promise that “no personally identifiable information is collected by these tools,” the     ... MORE

Richard Pollock: IRS Has Active Contract For MILLIONS With The Same Bunch Of Nitwits That Botched Healthcare.gov

More prudence with tax dollars.       Seven months after federal officials fired CGI Federal for its botched work on Obamacare website Healthcare.gov, the IRS awarded the same company a $4.5 million IT contract for its new Obamacare tax program. CGI is a $10.5 billion Montreal-based company that has forever been etched into     ... MORE

The IRS Customer Service Will Be Extra Bad This Year

by Lori Mongomery.   Taxpayers will face the worst levels of service in more than a decade from the Internal Revenue Service this filing season, with as few as 43 percent of callers getting through to an agent and then only after waits of 30 minutes or more, according to a report released Wednesday. In her annual report to Congress, National    ... MORE

NSA Reports Detail Decade's Worth Of Privacy Violations

by Jesse Byrnes.    The National Security Agency has quietly released more than a decade of reports detailing surveillance activities that potentially violated U.S. citizens' privacy rights. Covering NSA activities from mid-2001 to 2013, the heavily-redacted reports document possible abuses, including instances of employees emailing classified   ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Should Profiling Be Banned?

Upon further review.        Last week, the Obama administration announced new curbs on racial profiling by federal law enforcement. Before deciding whether this is good or bad policy, we might try to develop a description/definition of racial profiling or any other kind of profiling. A good definition of profiling in general is the use of   ... MORE

The Hidden Privacy Threat of … Flashlight Apps?

by Robert McMillian. When I downloaded the Flashlight app to my iPhone, I was in a jam. I was camping, I think. Or maybe a pen had rolled under my couch. I remember that smug sense of self-congratulation after I downloaded the software, which converted the iPhone’s LED flash into a steady and bright beam of light. But I shouldn't have been so   ... MORE

Andrew Napolitano: Clapper Under The Bus

The buck stops there.   When President Obama attributed the rise in Iraq of the Islamic State, or ISIS, to the failures of the U.S. intelligence community earlier this week, naming and blaming directly National Intelligence Director Gen. James Clapper, he was attempting to deflect criticism of his own incompetence. He was discussing the fact   ... MORE

VIDEO: How Jay Leno Changed The Politics Of Late Night

IBD Editorial: Press Helps Obama Censor The News

It's not often that the press exposes its own bias.     But a Washington Post story this week reveals both the Obama administration's attempts to censor the news and the media's complicity in that effort. For decades, news outlets have relied on pool reports from a rotating group of White House correspondents who follow the president  ... MORE

Josh Hicks: IRS Finds More Key Hard-Drive Crashes

They say just bad luck, no tampering.      The Internal Revenue Service is missing e-mails from five more employees whose records could shed light on the agency’s targeting scandal, but there are no signs that its personnel have intentionally destroyed evidence, according to an IRS review. In a report to four congressional committees on Friday,   ... MORE

"The Police Force Is Watching The People"

by Sheldon Richman.         Political philosophy — the libertarian philosophy included — can take you only so far. The libertarian philosophy provides grounds for condemning aggression, that is, the initiation of force, and along with some supplemental considerations, it identifies in the abstract what constitutes aggression, victimhood, and      ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: The Media And The Mob Of Ferguson

The bias of the bullet-counters.        Casting blame based on skin color should have ended with Jim Crow. Those of us who admit that we were not there and do not know what happened when Michael Brown was shot by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo., seem to be in the minority. We all know what has happened since then — and it has been a      ... MORE

Laziness At The Expense Of Privacy And Freedom

by Leon Spencer.       John McAfee calls out Google and our own laziness. Computer antivirus software developer John McAfee made a surprise appearance at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas over the weekend, where he spoke about the "eroded nature of privacy in our lives today". McAfee, founder of the antivirus software company   ... MORE

Fed Watchdogs Stonewalled By Obama Administration

The truth must not be their friend.    Independent watchdogs from federal agencies decried on Tuesday what they said were Obama administration efforts to delay or stall their investigations. A letter to Congress from dozens of inspectors general cites specific instances in which watchdogs for the Justice Department, Environmental   ... MORE

Brenda Craig: Before You Blow The Whistle - Read This

A very risky business.      Washington, DC: Computer systems analyst and former National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, unleashed an unprecedented volume of government secrets and became the world’s best-known whistleblower. Some of the details of American security operations are simply embarrassing. In other cases, the   ... MORE