The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. “Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it,” he says. The reason? “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”

Major cities like New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and even Houston have been declared by the Department of Homeland Security to be within the official 100 mile ‘border’ of the United States, subjecting 197 million citizens to electronic belonging searches without any suspicion.

Read more: http://www.storyleak.com/are-you-living-in-fourth-amendment-exclusion-zo...

WASHINGTON—Many motorists don't know it, but it's likely that every time they get behind the wheel, there's a snitch along for the ride.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Friday proposed long-delayed regulations requiring auto manufacturers to include event data recorders—better known as "black boxes"—in all new cars and light trucks beginning Sept. 1, 2014.

In Texas, of all places, a high school student is expelled because she refused to wear the mandatory school-issued RFID trackers because they violate not only her privacy but also her religious beliefs.

I bet she was all for this kind of thing when her precious Bushy Boy was the boss.

After getting the ACS in the mail, this guy calls the Dept. of Commerce to tell him he won't fill it out. They threaten him with a $5000 fine. Instead, he puts the entire 28 page document online. If you were ever curious what's in this thing, here you go.

He is the creator of Cryptocat, a project “to combine my love of cryptography and cats,” he explained to an overflowing audience of hackers at the HOPE conference on Saturday, July 14.

Governmental Secrecy: Shield for Tyranny, Incompetence, and Corruption

An essential pillar of democracy is openness. There is no way that people can meaningfully participate in government, even if only by voting for representatives, if they do not have access to accurate information related to government operations. This was well understood by the founders of the US and embedded in the Bill of Rights. Conversely, a salient characteristic of undemocratic systems of all types, such as Czarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany is a high degree of governmental secrecy.

Twitter said in its first transparency report that the number of government requests for user information or to block content is rising in 2012. "We've received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011," Twitter's legal policy manager Jeremy Kessel said in a blog post on Monday. The overwhelming number of requests came from the United States, accounting for 679 of the 849 requests for user information. In 75 per cent of the US cases, Twitter gave some or all information.

Though it was voted down by congress in 2003 due to privacy concerns, the NSA's new data center, now being constructed in Utah, will intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of domestic communications including private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as personal data trails such as parking receipts, travel itineraries, and bookstore purchases.