Bank of America Settlements Impede Fraud Probe, Arizona Says

By Karen Gullo
January 26, 2012

(Adds Arizona’s participation in multistate settlement in 13th paragraph.)

Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp. is impeding an investigation of its loan modification practices by negotiating settlements with borrowers who must agree to keep them secret and not criticize the bank in exchange for cash payments and loan relief, Arizona officials say.

The Arizona Attorney General’s office is asking a court to block those aspects of the settlements and require the bank to turn over all the agreements. The bank denies any wrongdoing.

One 2011 accord involving a borrower facing foreclosure who defaulted on a $253,142 mortgage included a $5,000 payment, plus $7,500 for legal fees, and the defaulted payments were waived and the loan was modified to a 40-year term with a 2 percent interest rate, court documents show. The terms of the original loan and the borrower’s complaint about the lender weren’t described in the documents.

The borrower “will remove and delete any online statements regarding this dispute, including, without limitation, postings on Facebook, Twitter and similar websites,” and not make any statements “that defame, disparage or in any way criticize” the bank’s reputation, practices or conduct, according to documents filed in state court in Phoenix. The borrower’s name and address were redacted.

Non-Disparagement

Bank of America attorneys argue that borrowers don’t have to sign the agreements to get a loan modification and deny that settlements hinder the state’s probe. Borrowers can be subpoenaed to disclose the accords, and the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank won’t enforce the non-disparagement provision if they talk to investigators, the bank’s lawyers have said in court filings.

A hearing is set for Feb. 1 on the dispute.

Arizona Attorney General Thomas Horne, a Republican who took office last January, is investigating Bank of America as part of a 2010 lawsuit alleging customers of its Countrywide Financial mortgage unit were misled about requirements for loan modifications. The bank, which acquired Calabasas, California- based Countrywide in 2008, provided inaccurate and deceptive reasons for denying modification applications, according to the the complaint. A similar suit was filed by Nevada.

The settlement agreements came to light as state investigators followed up on borrower complaints filed with the attorney general’s office. The office learned of 12 settlements while examining 1,900 complaints and when it attempted to contact the borrowers, Assistant Attorney General Carolyn Matthews said in Jan. 11 court filing.

Frequent Contact

Only four returned phone calls and none would provide a copy of the settlement, Matthews said. Some who signed the settlements had previously been in frequent contact with the attorney general’s office, according to court records.

Matthews contends that under the terms of the settlements, even if subpoenaed, borrowers can’t reveal any unflattering information about the bank. They couldn’t talk about misrepresentations the bank made about loan modifications, which is what the state is investigating, she said.

“These agreements have completely silenced even the most communicative consumers,” Matthews said in the filing. “The settlement agreement purposefully makes it impossible, legally and practically, for a consumer signing it to come forward, voluntarily and promptly, to provide evidence in this case.”

She asked a state judge to order Bank of America to notify borrowers who signed the agreements that they don’t have to adhere to the confidentiality and non-disparagement provisions.

Settlement Talks

Arizona has been participating in settlement negotiations between the five biggest U.S. mortgage servicers, including Bank of America, and state and federal officials to resolve a nationwide prove of foreclosure practices, Matthews said in an e-mail yesterday.

If Arizona joins any final settlement reached, that would affect the state’s lawsuit against Bank of America, she said.

“While Arizona is evaluating and is interested in the multistate settlement, Arizona will not join it unless we are able to simultaneously resolve our claims against Bank of America set forth in our separate lawsuit,” Matthews said.

Inappropriate Practices

Settlements with borrowers are more likely in cases in which the bank engaged in inappropriate practices, such as steering customers away from more affordable loans, or canceling a mortgage modification after a single payment went missing from a borrower who otherwise kept up with payments, said Patricia Garcia Duarte, chief executive officer of Neighborhood Housing Services of Phoenix Inc., which works with families facing foreclosure. Bank of America is a contributor to the organization, according to the group’s website.

Patricia Lee Refo, a Bank of America attorney, said in court filings that the confidentiality provisions are common in settlement agreements, which the bank uses on a “limited” basis to resolve disputes and avoid a costly lawsuit. There’s no policy to ask borrowers to sign settlement agreements in exchange for loan modifications, David Thornton, senior vice president for social media and urgent customer relations, said in a filing.

‘Extremely Serious’

“Plaintiff cannot ask this court enter the extremely serious finding that defendants have interfered with law enforcement based on one settlement agreement, or even 12, containing plain vanilla terms litigants use every day to resolve disputes,” Refo said in a court filing.

The bank can’t say how many settlements have been reached with Arizona customers because the agreements aren’t centrally stored on computers, Thornton said.

“We look at each situation on a case-by-case basis and decide what to do based on the specific situation,” Shirley Norton, a Bank of America spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

Wells Fargo & Co., the biggest U.S. bank by market value and the largest mortgage lender, has a similar practice, said James Hines, a spokesman for the San Francisco-based bank.

“Each case is unique and for a variety of reasons we may elect to include a confidentiality and/or a non-disparagement agreement as part of the settlement,” Hines said in an e-mail. He said he didn’t know how many settlements had been reached.

Borrowers’ Boon

Loan modification settlements are a boon for borrowers struggling to keep their homes, Duarte said in a phone interview. Duarte said she doesn’t see many such settlements and that borrowers who sign one can’t talk about them.

“That shouldn’t apply to investigators like the attorney general,” she said.

Lump sum payments of thousands of dollars and provisions blocking borrowers from criticizing banks aren’t common, she said.

“Clearly the banks are freaking out, they are paranoid,” Duarte said. Bank of America “has the worst reputation because it’s so large. A lot of it isn’t their fault, it was Countrywide.”

The case is Arizona v. Countrywide Financial Corp. CV2010-033580, Arizona Superior Court, Maricopa County (Phoenix).

--Editors: Peter Blumberg, Glenn Holdcraft

To contact the reporter on this story: Karen Gullo in San Francisco at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Sources: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-26/bank-of-america-settlements-impede-fraud-probe-arizona-says.html
image: file

Staring at Empty Pages

by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout  Op-Ed
Thursday 26 January 2012

Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park in October 2011. The movement was not directly mentioned in President Obama's State of the Union address, but many themes were. (Photo: Ed Yourdan / flickr)

Staring at empty pages,
 Centered 'round the same old plot,
 Staring at empty pages,
 Flowing along the ages...

 - Traffic

The Occupy Wall Street movement should spend today doing a nice little victory lap, because it seemed for all the world like its members were ghost-writers on President Obama's State of the Union speechwriting staff. Though he never directly mentioned the movement itself, Mr. Obama spent a great deal of time on Tuesday night underscoring many of Occupy's most central themes: income inequality, tax fairness, and the need to rein in the illegal and immoral behavior of the nation's largest financial institutions.

Talk is cheap, of course; despite all of Mr. Obama's high-flown rhetoric, his administration is reportedly prepared to cut a disgracefully easy deal with the five banks most directly responsible for the financial meltdown, giving his so-pretty words a hollow ring:

Five banks - Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Ally Financial (formerly GMAC) -would pay the federal government $25 billion. About $17 billion would be used to reduce the principal that some struggling homeowners owe, $5 billion more would be used for future federal and state programs and $3 billion would be used to help homeowners refinance at 5.25 percent. Civil immunity would be granted to the banks for any role in foreclosure fraud, and there would be no investigations.

There are several reasons why this is could be a terrible deal. For one, the dollar amount is inadequate in relation to both the tremendous loss of wealth via mortgage fraud and the hefty balance sheets of these massive companies. Furthermore, the banks might be allowed to use investor money instead of their own funds - this makes the penalty even lower. Beyond all that: it's extremely hard to justify the absence of investigations and punishment for mortgage fraud that was so widespread and so damaging to people's lives.

There are also many other, more serious problems besides a lack of punitive action. The small amount of money - and the federal government's recent inability to truly help underwater mortgage holders, of which there are currently 11 million - means that the victims of mortgage fraud might not see enough relief. And perhaps most importantly, with no real punishment for widespread damaging fraud, what are the incentives on Wall Street not to engage in similarly destructive practices once again?

Yeah, kind of makes Mr. Obama's proposed Financial Crimes Unit seem like drovers sent out to catch the horses three years after the barn door was left open, doesn't it? The hope of getting justice for the crimes that brought down the economy has been feeling more remote with each passing day - if there ever was any real hope to begin with - and the soft plea about to be copped by the worst offenders appears to sound the death knell for any such action. Funny how that part didn't find its way into the speech. "We'll get 'em from now on," seems to be the theme.

Sure you will.

Still, I suppose fluffy rhetoric has its place in any speech, especially a straight-up campaign speech like this one. It certainly did Mitt Romney no favors. His campaign has all the timing skills of a bad comic on open-mike night; by releasing his tax returns on the doorstep of the State of the Union, thus revealing his extravagant income, off-shore financial havens and amazingly low tax rate, Romney became the poster-child for everything the president was talking about on Tuesday night. This will serve the president's re-election campaign well in the general election, but Mr. Romney still has a Gingrich problem to solve before he gets there. The Florida GOP primary is five days away, Romney's once-epic lead there has dwindled to practically nil...and if he loses that one, the stench of panic emanating from RNC headquarters will be palpable.

So, sure, words have their place, especially in politics.

Not everyone out there is talking without doing, however.

A few nights ago, Jacob Burris, the campaign manager for Arkansas Democratic Congressional candidate Ken Aden, came home to find the family cat dead in front of his house, its skull crushed, its eyes hanging out of their sockets, with the word "LIBERAL" scrawled on its body. Mr. Burris' four children were with him when he made the grisly discovery.

Kermit Womack, a talk show host for radio station KURM in Arkansas, has been releasing the addresses of political opponents he doesn't like over the air. While no firm, direct link has been established, it can be assumed that someone decided to take violent action after the location of Mr. Burris' home went out over the air. It was a cat, this time...but given the gruesome nature of the act, Mr. Burris must correctly be wondering if it could have been one of his children.

Not everyone out there is talking without doing, you see. The best lack all integrity, the poet said, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. It will take more than empty pages to counteract the hatred, violence and extremism that is sweeping across this nation.

Take note, Mr. President. Note it well.

Sources: http://www.truth-out.org/staring-empty-pages/1327583022

Who Really Stopped SOPA, and Why?

By Larry Downes, Contributor
January 25, 2012

I split my time these days between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill, and last week was a very good week to be in Washington.  In the fall, I witnessed the beginnings of a unique revolt over proposed legislation that would have dramatically changed the Internet’s business landscape.  Last week, that revolt achieved a stunning victory, sending Congress into a tailspin of retreat from bills that seemed certain, only months ago, to pass with little notice or resistance.

The two bills were the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, or #PIPA and #SOPA as they became known on Twitter, where millions of Tweets condemned them and their supporters in and out of Congress.  Heavily backed by D.C. favorites including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the music and motion picture industries, the legislation was superficially aimed at combating the scourge of foreign websites selling unlicensed or counterfeit American goods to U.S. consumers outside the legal reach of criminal and civil enforcement.

But to Internet users, the proposed legislation and the process by which it was steamrolled through a supine Congress took on mythic attributes.  By the end of last week the firefight had morphed into a battle of old economy vs. new, of business as usual in Washington vs. the organized chaos of online life, of K Street lobbyists vs. ordinary users.

The Internet was having its Howard Beale moment—users were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore. The legislation needed to be stopped, by any means necessary. PIPA and SOPA became nothing less than a referendum on who controlled the evolution of digital life. And amidst the smoke on noise on the field, it was hard to tell who was really directing the troops.

One thing is now entirely clear. The Internet won–at least for now. Two weeks ago, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, lawmakers and industry representatives were clearly in retreat, calling at last—but with panic in their eyes—for constructive dialogue. Sandra Aistars, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, even complained that the technology community had failed to propose concrete “tweaks” to fix the bills. “A lot of the response has been amped up rhetoric that misstates the bills and the intentions of its proponents,” Aistars said. “It is not directed to particular fixes.”

But the time for constructive dialogue, which Congress and industry groups had overtly snubbed all year, was over. As CES attendees made their way home over the holiday weekend, the Obama administration, which had been notably silent, weighed in against the bills in their current form. “While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response,” administration officials said, “we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” Another nail.

By the time the Congressional Internet Caucus convened its annual “State of the Net” meeting a few days later, it was clear that something dramatic was happening. Defections accelerated to an unprecedented rate as advocacy groups opposed to the bills shuttled between Congressional offices. Co-sponsors were now condemning the legislation. By Tuesday, it was no longer clear if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) even had enough votes to stop a promised filibuster from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Jan. 24^th, when Reid intended to force a floor vote on PIPA.

On Wednesday, the rebels detonated their nuclear option. Wikipedia and Reddit, along with other popular websites, went black, generating thousands of calls and millions of emails, many from constituents who had likely never heard of the legislation the day before. Online petitions picked up 10,000,000 signatures, members of Congress received 3,000,000 emails and a still-unknown number of phone calls. Thirty-four Senators felt obliged to come out publicly against the legislation. That night, all four Republican candidates condemned the bills during a televised debate.

The State of the Net, as I said at one of several events that week, was very very annoyed.

By Friday, what had long been seen even by opponents as a done deal had become a deal undone. Both Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tx.), chief sponsors of PIPA and SOPA respectively, threw in the towel. Scheduled votes were off, planned markups were canceled; the legislation was dead. The war was over, at least for now, and perhaps until after the 2012 elections.

After sixteen successful efforts to extend or enhance copyright law over the last thirty-five years, the content industry’s perfect winning streak had finally ended. There was only now to cart off the dead and count up the wounded, and the battle would be over. At least until the next time.

Who Were Those Masked Men?

Meanwhile, now seems as good a time as any to ask what last week’s uprising really meant. Who was behind the remarkable campaign to stop the bills? How did they turn a bi-partisan majority against the legislation? Why did they care?

These are not merely academic questions. A new and profoundly different political force has emerged in the last few months, a constituency that identifies itself not by local interests but as citizens of the Internet. Understanding who they are and what they want is essential for both the winners and losers in last week’s slugfest. Ignore the lessons of the great uprising—of the dramatic introduction of “bitroots” politics—at your peril.

While there was plenty of traditional interest group politics at work here, the big story of last week (largely missed by traditional media) was the great awakening of Internet users. To be sure, the Consumer Electronics Association and advocacy organizations including NetCoalition were early in sounding the alarm about the proposed legislation early last year.

And a joint letter to Congress in mid-November from leading technology companies including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and EBay expressing concern over PIPA and SOPA was clearly one of many key events in turning momentum against the proposed laws. Visits from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists played a role as well.

But to imagine that the millions of Internet users who took to the virtual streets over the last few months were simply responding to the clarion call of technology companies misses the real point–dangerously so.

Rather, it was the users who urged and sometimes pressured technology companies to oppose the bills, not the other way around. While the big companies eventually came on board, the push for them to do so came largely from activists using social networking and social news sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit, to build momentum and exert leverage, sometimes on the very companies whose tools they were using.

If there is a first mover in this creation story, it would start with the influential blog Techdirt and its founder Mike Masnick. When PIPA passed out of a Senate committee in May without any debate, Masnick started writing every day (sometimes many times a day) about the potential danger of the bill and the disingenuous process by which it was being railroaded through Congress.

Progress seemed to be made. Over the summer, House leaders promised to fix the many problems in PIPA in their soon-to-be-introduced version of the bill. The technology community had been heard.

But when SOPA was unveiled in October, the seventy-page draft was worse—far worse—than PIPA, offering a virtual Christmas list of new legal powers and technical remedies for copyright and trademark holders, none of which would have done much to stop infringement even as they rewrote basic rules of digital life.

In the name of combating rogue foreign websites, SOPA would have allowed law enforcement agencies and private parties to force U.S. ISPs to reroute user requests, force search engines to remove valid links, and require ad networks and payment processors to cut ties with condemned sites.

Users who streamed a minimal amount of licensed content without permission, including through YouTube, would face felony charges. And most of the new powers made use of short-cut legal procedures that strained the limits of due process.

That’s when the activists, online and off, shifted into high gear. The crusade was picked up on the social news site Reddit, which in turn drove protests at Tumblr and Mozilla, among others. At one point, Reddit users organized a boycott of domain registrar GoDaddy, which was forced to beat a hasty retreat from its longstanding support for the bills in a very public and embarrassing about-face.

The rebels had learned the Death Star’s fatal design flaw, and were massing at the border to exploit it.

It was this groundswell of opposition—the first signs of a coherent and powerful bitroots movement–that pushed executives at these companies and later their more established peers to go public with what had been more discreet opposition to the bills. In particular, Google, which had hedged on PIPA earlier in the year, took up the anti-SOPA flag and ran it through anyone on Capitol Hill who got in the way. And they brought many of their competitors along for the fight.

What are they Fighting for?

In Washington, the accepted wisdom by year-end was that the technology industry had matured at last into a lobbying force commensurate with its size and pocketbook. But what everyone missed was that the users had opened a third front in this fight, and clearly the one that determined its outcome.

The bitroots movement wasn’t led by Google. It wasn’t led by anyone. Even to look for its leaders is to miss the point. Internet users didn’t lobby or buy their way into influence. They used the tools at their disposal—Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and the rest—to make their voices heard. They encouraged voluntary boycotts and blackouts, and organized awareness days. This was a revolt of, by and with social networks, turning the tools that organized them into groups in the first place into potent new weapons for political advocacy. The users had figured out how to hack politics.

Now that the prototype has proven effective, we can expect similar responses to proposed legislation and regulation affecting other aspects of digital life in the future. And Internet activists will continue to co-opt the latest technology in singular pursuit of their goals and agendas.

Which are what, exactly? The answer is easy to find. And necessary. Those who are serious about channeling the energies of the PIPA and SOPA revolt into productive uses need to understand not just the how but also the why of last week’s victory.

The political philosophy of the Internet, though still largely unformed, is by no means inarticulate. The aspirations of Internet users largely reflect the best features of the technology itself—open, meritocratic, non-proprietary and transparent. Its central belief is the power of innovation to make things better, and its major tenet is a ruthless economic principle that treats information as currency, and sees any obstacle to its free flow as inefficient friction to be engineered out of existence.

Those seeking to understand what kind of governance Internet users are willing to accept would do well to start by studying the engineering that establishes the network and how it is governed. The key protocols and standards that make the Internet work—that make the Internet the Internet–are developed and modified by voluntary committees of engineers, who meet virtually to debate the merits of new features, design changes, and other basic enhancements.

The engineering task forces are meritocratic and open. The best ideas win through vigorous debate and testing. No one has seniority or a veto. There’s no influence peddling or lobbyists. The engineers are allergic to hypocrisy and public relations rhetoric. It’s a pure a form of democracy as has ever been implemented. And it works amazingly well.

Today’s Internet activists have adopted those engineering principles as their political philosophy. In that sense, their core ideals have not changed much since 1996, when John Perry Barlow published his prophetic “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in response to an equally ill-considered law that banned “indecent” content from the then-primitive World Wide Web. (The U.S. Supreme Court quickly threw it out as unconstitutional.) “We have no elected government,” Barlow wrote, “nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.”

Barlow went on to “declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.” Barlow explains both the good and the bad, the productive and destructive, of the spirit that brought Congress to its knees last week. And does so, as with Jefferson two hundred years before, in the language of a poet. (Seriously, just follow the link and read the whole thing.)

In their political youth, Internet users are still profoundly idealistic and even a little naïve. They believe in democracy, freedom of expression and transparent governance; they have little tolerance for draconian rules, for back-room deals, or for imposed legalistic “solutions” to poorly-defined problems that might be better solved with more technology. They are, if anything, more libertarian than anything else. But even that label implies a willingness to engage in traditional political theater, a willingness that doesn’t exist.

Like most online communities, this political activism is largely nonhierarchical, relying on consensus and open debate rather than delegation. Titles and resumes play little part in deliberations—each users and her point of view is evaluated on the strength or weakness of their argument.

And there are no permanent allegiances or mutual back-scratching. Google has been on both sides of similar, albeit smaller, outbursts, as has Apple, Facebook, and other leading technology companies. In their stampede for Internet freedom, users will trample anyone perceived to stand in the way – Republicans, Democrats, mainstream media, technology companies, industry groups, and governments from local to international.

In the bitroots community, engineers play a unique role as trusted and objective commentators on what is and is not good for the Internet’s underlying technology. They are the shamans who interpret the cryptic (and encrypted) messages of the gods, and they must be consulted before making any great or small change to the architecture that has delivered the users into the new world.

Engineers are trusted because they have proven themselves objective. They simply don’t have the capacity for double-talk. Ask them how the network will respond to a proposed alteration – whether of technology or law – and they will tell you. Their candor may be novel for those used to governments built on subterfuge, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable.

One of the unforgivable sins of the PIPA and SOPA process, consequently, was a complete failure to engage with anyone in the engineering community; what lawmakers on both sides of the issue regularly referred to as “bringing in the nerds.”

And engineers were essential to getting it right, assuming that’s what the bills’ supporters really wanted to do. Both bills would have required ISPs to make significant changes to key Internet design principles—notably the process for translating web addresses to actual servers. Yet lawmakers freely admitted that they understood nothing of how that technology worked. Indeed, many seemed to think it was cute to begin their comments by confessing they’d never used, let alone studied, the infrastructure with which they were casually tinkering.

The Next Internet Revolt

Internet users have revolted in the face of earlier efforts to regulate their activities, but never on this scale or with this kind of momentum. Perhaps that’s because PIPA and SOPA presented a perfect storm. The draft legislation was terrible, the legislative process was cynical and undemocratic, and the public relations efforts of supporters fell flat on every level.

Yet it’s already clear that the losers in the PIPA/SOPA fight have learned nothing from the profound activation of Internet users. Last week, Rep. Lamar Smith, SOPA’s chief sponsor, dismissed the Wikipedia blackout as a “publicity stunt,” while Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), PIPA’s author, blamed defecting Republicans (defections were bi-partisan, as was opposition to both bills from the beginning). And supporters are already looking for opportunities to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. “My hope is that after a brief delay, we will, together, confront this problem,” Leahy said yesterday.

The content industry has proven equally tone deaf. Speaking this week at the Sundance Film Festival, MPAA President (and former Senator) Chris Dodd called last week’s protest “white noise” that “has made it impossible to have a conversation.” That is, now that the industry has deigned to lower itself to having a conversation at all.

John Fithian, CEO of the National Association of Theatre Owners, unintentionally summed up everything that was wrong with the process from the beginning, “The backlash occurred,” he said, “Google made its point, they’re big and tough and we get it. Hopefully now reasonable minds will prevail.”

They don’t get it at all. It wasn’t Google who made “the point,” it was the company’s millions of users. The sponsors of SOPA and PIPA don’t even know who stopped them cold. But supporters of the proposed laws are retrenching anyway, preparing to launch a new assault on an enemy it hasn’t identified.

Given both their arrogance and ignorance, it goes without saying that the content industries are unlikely to avoid similar catastrophes in the future, let alone find a way to work collaboratively with a political force they don’t know—or believe–exists.

On the other side, it’s hardly time to declare victory and go home. Last week’s win aside, the future success of the bitroots movement is far from certain. Whether the next issue is rogue websites, electronic surveillance, FCC oversight or government censorship (foreign or domestic), it may not always be so easy to call the Internet faithful to put up a united front.

Right now, it takes little more than a few key phrases – “open,” “censorship,” “privacy,” “break the Internet” – to hook the outrage of the Internet masses. But maintaining momentum requires something more sophisticated. And the accusations have to prove true.

To become a permanent counterbalance to traditional governments, the bitroots movement will need to become more nuanced and more proactive. To avoid the very real possibility of mob rule, Internet activists must use their power responsibly. SOPA was a gimme. But legislators and regulators won’t go quietly from this or future efforts to exert their influence over the Internet.

As the information economy increasingly becomes the economy that matters, we’ll need to find ways to accommodate Internet values to traditional rulemaking, to bridge the expanding chasm between Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley. The stakes are high—the future of the economy as well as the technology depends on getting it right. We can’t afford to mess it up. And we can’t afford to dismiss the bitroots movement as a sporadic, random outburst.

It’s worth remembering that some legislative interference has been valuable to the infant digital economy. These include protections in the U.S. against holding websites responsible for third party content (hard to imagine Facebook or Twitter or Reddit existing without that) and laws that minimize the authority of the Federal Communications Commission to work its particular brand of poison against broadband providers (they still oversee dial-up Internet services, and look how healthy that is).

Those acts of happy foresight seem far from the minds of tomorrow’s would-be regulators, however. In an interview Thursday, former Senator Dodd called for a summit between “Internet companies” and content companies, in hopes of finding a compromise on PIPA and SOPA. “The perfect place to do it is a block away from here,” said Dodd, pointing to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

No, Mr. Dodd, the White House is not the “perfect place” to engage with Internet companies. And it isn’t the companies who matter the most. If you really want a “conversation,” you need to engage with Internet users, and you need to do so nearly anywhere except inside the beltway.

The only place to really engage your new adversaries is where they live—online, in chat rooms and user forums and social networks, on Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and Reddit and whatever comes next. If you want to understand what went so horribly wrong with your business-as-usual efforts, you’ll need to take up residence in the digital realm and learn its new rules of engagement.

And if you want to persuade Internet users to help you innovate solutions for your industry’s many problems, you’ll need to come without your handlers and spin doctors, and without any expectation that your credentials or past accomplishments will carry weight in a serious debate about the costs and benefits of changing the architecture of the Internet to reduce copyright infringement. Come armed with facts, not rhetoric. Bring an open mind. And some engineers.

Oh, and if you’re serious about making real progress, stop calling us nerds.

Do you think “bitroots” activism is here for the long haul, or was last week just a flash in the pan? Let us know. And follow me on Twitter @LarryDownes.

Sources: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/25/who-really-stopped-sopa-and-why/
images: file

Administrative Note: It is astonishing that Dem Sen Leahy is not only Sponsor of PIPA but since there is a Democratic Majority in the Senate, to ALLOW that bill to go forward WITHOUT ANY DEBATE ... is just one more example of prattling politicians of both ilk are imperious and out of touch with REAL people, much less the subject matter to which they are to oversee. and of course, as Chriss Dodd, an old Friend of Leahy ... I wonder how much help Dodd might have given Leahy on writing PIPA ? Is that against the law?  Lobbying in the pockets on the Billionaires while the PEOPLE are struggling. There are already laws as I and others pointed out that the government has to STOP "piracy" that is actually costing American Jobs, this was just a POWER grab to control something they don't even fully understand. So Sen Leahy ... get off your Righteous Hi Horse and put your face in that pile laying on the ground behind it. You are simply out to control sites like mine that bring real brutal truth flat facts without hagiographic spin and prancing prattling phony pious political pigeon poop. And one more thing I agree with the author and say here again because it NEEDS to be said:

Oh, and if you’re serious about making real progress, stop calling us nerds.

MPAA threat sparks White House petition for bribery probe
 

Politicians should remember who bought them, MPAA CEO warns
 

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco  Get more from this author
 
Posted in Music and Media, 23rd January 2012 18:04 GMT

Chris Dodd, ex–US senator and current CEO of the Motion Picture Ass. of America, may face a White House investigation after he made an extraordinary outburst that appeared to threaten politicians who had the audacity to take the entertainment industry’s money and then abandon SOPA/PIPA online-piracy legislation.

“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake," Dodd told Fox News. "Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!

The comments caused a huge stir, and prompted a petition, hosted on the White House's "We the People" opinion-seeking site, that calls for an investigation of the MPAA on bribery charges.

Once the number of signatures on the petition reaches 25,000, the White House has to issue a statement – and as of early afternoon Washington DC time, over 19,000 signatures had been attached. It was such a petition, by the way, that prompted the White House to express its initial disapproval of SOPA.

“This is an open admission of bribery,” the petition reads, "and a threat designed to provoke a specific policy goal. This is a brazen flouting of the 'above the law' status people of Dodd's position and wealth enjoy. We demand justice. Investigate this blatant bribery and indict every person, especially government officials and lawmakers, who is involved.”

Dodd may have thought he was among friends on Rupert Murdoch’s “Fair and Balanced” Fox network, or could just have been angry at the temporary hold put on the legislation, but it’s highly unusual for anyone in his position to openly acknowledge the way the US political system works. Companies and individuals who "donate" to US lawmakers usually express the convenient fiction that their financial contributions are expressions of support for a candidate, and not attempts to bribe them on specific issues.

“It was Hollywood’s arrogance in pushing bills through Congress without proper vetting that caused them to be withdrawn; these threats also are not helpful to figuring out what ails the industry and how to solve their issues,” said Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, which is fighting the legislation. “If the MPAA is truly concerned about the jobs of truck drivers and others in the industry, then it can bring its overseas filming back to the US and create more jobs.”

Sources: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/23/mpaa_bribery_petition_white_house/
image: file

 “This is an open admission of bribery,” the petition reads, "and a threat designed to provoke a specific policy goal. This is a brazen flouting of the 'above the law' status people of Dodd's position and wealth enjoy. We demand justice. Investigate this blatant bribery and indict every person, especially government officials and lawmakers, who is involved.”

Rare Sea Creature Appears on Seattle Woman's Dock

Hey, stranger! This guy must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. CREDIT: LDA.

by Andrea Mustain
Date: 20 January 2012

A Seattle resident recently got a big surprise when she discovered a strange-looking furry visitor on her property.

"She woke up and it was lying on her dock, hanging out and sleeping — just chilling," said Matthew Cleland, district supervisor in western Washington for the USDA's Wildlife Services, and the recipient of a photo of the bizarre intruder.

"I thought, 'That's an interesting-looking creature,'" Cleland told OurAmazingPlanet. "I had no idea what it was."

A quick glance through a book in his office soon revealed it was a ribbon seal, an Arctic species that spends most of its life at sea, swimming the frigid waters off Alaska and Russia.

Somehow, the seal turned up on the woman's property, about a mile from the mouth of the Duwamish River, a highly industrialized waterway that cuts through southern Seattle. In 2001, the EPA declared the last 5.5 miles (9 kilometers) of the river a Superfund site — an area contaminated with hazardous substances in need of cleanup.

The sighting was "pretty exciting," said Arctic seal researcher Peter Boveng, leader of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory's Polar Ecosystems Program. "It's really unusual."

Ribbon seals, named for the unmistakable stark white markings that ring their necks, flippers and hindquarters, typically shun dry land.

Boveng said the animals spend only a few months per year on sea ice, to molt and give birth, and have almost never been seen so far south. "So it's a surprise, but knowing the species, it's not a complete surprise to me," he said. "They're good travelers."

The ribbon seal, which Boveng identified as an adult male, "looked to be in really good shape," he said. "We don't have any way to rule out other possibilities, but I'd say it's almost certain that it swam there."

Satellite tracking studies have revealed that ribbon seals do sometimes make it as far as the north Pacific Ocean, south of the Aleutian islands, but much about the species remains mysterious. Because they spend so much of their lives in the open water, it's a challenge to track them.

"Unfortunately we don't know a lot about their numbers," Boveng said. "There's never been a reliable survey."

A conservation groups has made efforts to list ribbon seals as an endangered species because of concerns about disappearing sea ice in the Arctic. So far the federal government has declined to do so, but is continuing to review the case for listing.

The Seattle ribbon seal appears to be only the second on record to make it so far south.

In 1962, a ribbon seal showed up on a beach near Morro Bay, Calif., a town about 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of Los Angeles. According to contemporary reports, the seal was in good shape, but totally bald except for hair on the head, neck and flippers. It died a month later at the local aquarium.

The Seattle ribbon seal's story is unknown, but one could be forgiven for thinking it a harbinger of things to come. This week, cold winds from Alaska helped create a record winter storm in Seattle, slamming the metro area with 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) of snow.

The ribbon seal hasn't been seen again since it was first spotted last week.

"It stirred up a lot of interest," Cleland said. "There are a lot of people out here looking for it."

Sources: http://www.livescience.com/18031-rare-sea-creature-appears-seattle-woman-dock.html

Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed?

Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes.
CREDIT: Creative Commons | The Opte Project

by Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 19 January 2012

The raging battle over SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy laws, is looking more and more likely to end in favor of Internet freedom — but it won't be the last battle of its kind. Although, ethereal as it is, the Internet seems destined to survive in some form or another, experts warn that there are many threats to its status quo existence, and there is much about it that could be ruined or lost.

Physical destruction

A vast behemoth that can route around outages and self-heal, the Internet has grown physically invulnerable to destruction by bombs, fires or natural disasters — within countries, at least. It's "very richly interconnected," said David Clark, a computer scientist at MIT who was a leader in the development of the Internet during the 1970s. "You would have to work real hard to find a small number of places where you could seriously disrupt connectivity." On 9/11, for example, the destruction of the major switching center in south Manhattan disrupted service locally. But service was restored about 15 minutes later when the center "healed" as the built-in protocols routed users and information around the outage.

However, while it's essentially impossible to cripple connectivity internally in a country, Clark said it is conceivable that one country could block another's access to its share of the Internet cloud; this could be done by severing the actual cables that carry Internet data between the two countries. Thousands of miles of undersea fiber-optic cables that convey data from continent to continent rise out of the ocean in only a few dozen locations, branching out from those hubs to connect to millions of computers. But if someone were to blow up one of these hubs — the station in Miami, for example, which handles some 90 percent of the Internet traffic between North America and Latin America — the Internet connection between the two would be severely hampered until the infrastructure was repaired.

Such a move would be "an act of cyberwar," Clark said.
 
Content cache
 
Even an extreme disruption of international connectivity would not seriously threaten the survival of Web content itself. A "hard" copy of most data is stored in nonvolatile memory, which sticks around with or without power, and whether you have Internet access to it or not. Furthermore, according to William Lehr, an MIT economist who studies the economics and regulatory policy of the Internet-infrastructure industries, the corporate data centers that harbor Web content — everything from your emails to this article — have sophisticated ways to back up and diversely store the data, including simply storing copies in multiple locations.
 
Google even stores cached copies of all Wikipedia pages; these were accessible on Jan. 18 when Wikipedia took its own versions of the pages offline in protest of SOPA and PIPA.
 
This diversified storage plan keeps the content itself safe, but it also offers some protection against loss of access to any one copy of the data in the event of a cyberwar. For example, if power were cut to a server, you may be unable to reach a website on its home server, but you mayfind a cached version of the content stored on another, accessible server. Or, "If you wanted data that was not available from a server in country X, you may be able to get substantively the same data from a server in country Y," Lehr said.
 
Internet arms race
 
The redundancy of so much online content and of connectivity routes makes the Internet resilient to physical attacks, but a much more serious threat to its status quo existence is government regulation or censorship. In the early days of Egypt's Arab Spring uprising, the government of Hosni Mubarak attempted to shut down the country's Internet in order to cripple protesters' ability to organize; it did this by ordering the state-controlled Internet Service Provider (ISP), which grants Internet access to customers, to cut service.
 
"ISPs have direct control of the Internet, so what happens in any country depends on the control that the state has over those ISPs," Clark told Life's Little Mysteries at the time. "Some countries regulate the ISPs much more heavily. China has in the past 'turned off' the Internet in various regions."
 
However, in Egypt last year, many protesters found ways to bootstrap connectivity and bypass the shut-off, such as by using smartphones to communicate with the global Internet over cellular networks and tapping into private companies' Intranet connections. "[A] lot of the connectivity to protesters was provided by workers who made access available to their business networks," Lehr said.
 
If, in future, the U.S. government sought to shut down or limit Internet access, similar workarounds would crop up, and they would grow more sophisticated as the regulatory methods became more extreme — a "weapons race," Lehr called it.  "The tools for fighting the war are mostly defensive (fire walls, shutting down interconnects, monitoring, locking up folks who have violated 'laws') but also can be offensive (viruses to attack hostile websites/destroy content, locking folks up preemptively, etc.)."
 
Governments could also simply tax Internet access, or providers could jack up the prices, in such a way as to price it out of reach of most people.
 
Lehr added that, while no single government could destroy the Internet everywhere, it could certainly cripple it sufficiently to render its use unattractive for people within its country of governance.
 
In the balance
 
Bad regulation, be it in any particular country or on the international scale, could severely hamper the Internet's value and its ability to grow, Lehr said. While some version of the Internet is likely to exist as long as humanity does, what might be lost or greatly diminished is "the openness of the Internet."
 
This openness is useful both economically and socially, but it is also a source of problems, Lehr noted; it lends itself to endless security and privacy attacks, junk mail, viruses, malware and so on. He believes new security models must be developed to protect privacy and security while still allowing the Internet to function.
 
"Whether we can effectively strike that balance is a difficult challenge and work in progress."

Sources: http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2085-internet-destroyed.html

Administrative Note: The Internet is NEVER "safe" from the New World Order move to control the spread of information.  We are ALREADY censored here in the United States though nearly all USA internet users think otherwise.

Americans cannot get this documentary "Life as Debt" something useful in these tough times ... but Canadiens and rest of world CAN.

I can understand stopping Big Screen, Big Star entertainmnet movies ... but informative documentaries have a "Fair Use" usage in spreading important and vital information that modern people NEED and the "Greedy Bastards" of the Movie and Music business are behind this.  If they charged a FAIR price ... piracy would drop because all web-based content cannot compete with DVD Disk of a Movie.

So, Americans, even WITHOUT the new SUPER LAWS of SOPA and PIPA ... YOU are being CENSORED already by Obama and he WILL sign a "Kill Internet" bill because he signed the Indefinate Detention Law he "promised" to veto.

Same Circus - Just different Clowns

Oceanographer Is No "Fish Out of Water"

Released:1/17/2012
Source: University of North Dakota  

Newswise — Can an oceanographer in the middle of the North American continent find happiness studying a flooding freshwater lake in landlocked North Dakota?

According to Xiaodong Zhang, an associate professor in earth systems science and policy at the University of North Dakota, the answer is a resounding “Yes!”

“I’m at the geographical center of the continent, which is equal distance from all the major oceans and the Gulf of Mexico,” said Zhang, who has a Ph.D. in oceanography. “It’s perfect because I can study any ocean I like.”

While Zhang continues to study oceans, these days much of his work focuses on the expansion of Devils Lake 90 miles west of Grand Forks, N.D. and the seemingly intractable problems it’s created. The lake has risen nearly 32 feet since 1993, increasing in volume by seven times and in area by nearly five times (261 square miles). It has inundated prime farmland, forced towns to relocate, and required government to spend more than $1 billion on flood mitigation projects.

“When I looked at doing research,” Zhang said, “I found that much of the current research lacks a rigorous study of the hydrological properties of not only the lake, but also of the entire Devils Lake Basin.

How high?
“We developed a hydrological model to study the rainfall and the runoff of the entire basin, instead of just the lake itself,” he explained. “We combined that model with NASA data and future climate predictions to see what the future looks like for Devils Lake. If the lake is still rising, how high will it go?”

While Devils Lake is considered a freshwater body, its water is relatively salty because it’s a terminal lake, which means that water flowing into the lake normally has no natural outlet. Evaporation causes the salts to concentrate, which makes the lake more saline than water in the surrounding environment.

“The salinity level is quite stable and doesn’t change very much,” Zhang said. “It’s about four parts per thousand. It’s significantly more saline than the Sheyenne River, which is generally around one part per thousand. In comparison, ocean water is about 35 parts per thousand.”

The thorny question of what to do with the lake’s saline water has raised controversy locally, regionally and internationally. The state built an outlet that drains Devils Lake water into the Sheyenne River, which flows into the Red River of the North and then into Canada. It plans to build an even larger outlet next year. If the lake rises another four feet to 1,458 feet above sea level, it will naturally overflow from adjacent Stump Lake into the Tolna Coulee and then into the Sheyenne River, an event geologists say has occurred twice in the past 4,000 years.

When Zhang came to UND in 2002, he wanted students in his class on hydrological cycles to understand how their lessons could be applied to everyday issues. Devils Lake was a natural fit.

“I invited one group from Devils Lake to talk to the class about how they were affected by the flooding,” he explained. “I also invited people who lived downstream along the Sheyenne River to talk about why they didn’t want the water discharged into their river. It gave the students two different perspectives, which got me really interested.”

Measuring water changes
In September under a NASA-funded project to monitor the lake’s water quality, Zhang and his students deployed a buoy that continuously measures water temperature, salinity, turbidity (cloudiness or muddiness), dissolved oxygen level and chlorophyll concentration, in addition to weather information. The buoy is in the Stump Lake portion of Devils Lake where the water quality is typically lowest.

“By monitoring water quality, we hope to have a better understanding of how it’s changing and what factors could cause that change,” he said. “We’ll better understand how the quality of water changes in response to the weather and long-term climate changes.”

Zhang is studying these issues in collaboration with two other UND researchers on NASA-funded projects. Andrei Kirilenko, an associate professor who works with Zhang in the Center for People and the Environment, examines the potential impact of future climate change on the lake. Yeo Howe Lim, associate professor of civil engineering in the School of Engineering and Mines, uses calibrated hydrologic computer modeling to predict whether the lake is likely to rise, fall or remain at its current level.

Lim specializes in water resource engineering and is using a variation of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hydrological model to determine the probability of different scenarios occurring. Using NASA data on Devils Lake, the computer model will be run a million times to determine which scenarios are more likely.

“If there’s a high probability of the lake going higher, then we really have to do something,” Lim said. “But the economics of additional measures become questionable if we have to protect against a 5 percent chance event above the current water level.”

Kirilenko has also been involved in research on climate change impacts on the watershed of the Aral Sea in Central Asia – which has been shrinking since the 1960s – and considers Devils Lake as a natural extension of his work.

“From my perspective, the interesting part is: what are the future prospects for the hydrology in Devils Lake watershed in relation to the possible changes in climate?” he asked.

“Devils Lake is an extremely interesting site for study because the impacts are large, but they’re regional. The simulations for climate change are usually done on a very coarse scale of around 200 by 200 miles. We have a much smaller watershed, so there’s a need for downscaling.”

With the North Dakota winter approaching, Zhang had to deal with a problem that oceanographers who use research buoys don’t face: removing the buoy before the lake freezes or risk having it destroyed by ice.

“Normally, when we put a buoy in the ocean we don’t bring it back; we leave it out there,” he laughed. “I’ve never dealt with this before. How do I bring it back? The buoy’s a round thing. There’s no handle.”

It’s just another challenge for an oceanographer in North Dakota.

Sources: http://www.newswise.com/articles/oceanographer-is-no-fish-out-of-water
image: Devils Lake Flooding USGS image

Administrative Note: According to NOAA increases in wter content of atmosphere will make rain and ALL precipitation events worse as we go through the next century which means severe flooding in some areas, drought in other areas and ALL storms will be of greater intensity due to increased moisture and temperature from Global Warming.

Past Southern Hemisphere Rain Link to Antarctic Temperatures

Released:1/18/2012

Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst 

Stalagmites in Pacupuhuain Cave in the Andes of Peru similar to ones sampled by Stephen Burns, Lisa Kanner and colleagues for their study of tropical rainfall cycles in the Southern Hemisphere. Analysis of oxygen isotopes in such features provide a 34,000-year record of rainfall variation in the Amazon Basin.

Newswise — AMHERST, Mass. – Geoscientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Minnesota this week published the first evidence that warm-cold climate oscillations well known in the Northern Hemisphere over the most recent glacial period also appear as tropical rainfall variations in the Amazon Basin of South America. It is the first clear expression of these cycles in the Southern Hemisphere.

The work by Stephen Burns and his doctoral student Lisa Kanner at UMass Amherst is reported in the current issue of ScienceXpress. Burns says, “The study also demonstrates that rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere of South America is, though to a lesser extent, also influenced by temperature changes in the Antarctic, which has not been previously observed.”

The last glacial period, from about 10,000 to about 120,000 years ago, saw North America and Western Europe covered in a thick continental ice sheet, the geoscientist points out. Yet climate was also highly unstable during the period, cycling every few thousand years between warm and cold, dry periods in the high northern latitudes. Temperatures could change by as much as 10 to 15 degrees Celsius.

Known as Dansgaard/Oeschger (D/O) cycles, these millennial-scale rapid climate events were first recognized in the Greenland ice cores, but have since been found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, Burns points out.

The UMass Amherst climate researcher is an expert in reading past climate data from the ratio of oxygen isotopes found in calcite in speleothems, another name for stalagmites, stalactites and other water-deposited cave features. Analyzing radioactive isotopes and stable oxygen isotopes in the calcite sampled from ancient cave formations can provide information on past rainfall over many thousands of years, Burns says.

He and Kanner used oxygen isotopic analyses from a 16-centimeter (about 6.3 inches) stalagmite recovered from a cave 2.4 miles (3,800 meters) above sea level in the Peruvian Andes for this study. The sample grew from 49,500 to 16,000 years ago, providing a 34,000-year-long record of rainfall changes in the Amazon Basin. Kanner and colleagues found that cold periods in the high Northern latitudes are associated with an increase in precipitation, the South American Summer Monsoon, in the Amazon Basin.

They found that cold periods in the Northern Hemisphere are associated with an increase in precipitation, the South American Summer Monsoon, in the Amazon Basin.

“This relationship is the exact opposite of changes in rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere tropics, where cold intervals result in a decrease in rainfall,” Burns says.

Revised chronology for several major climate events that took place in the last glacial period proposed in this study could lead to a better understanding of Antarctic warming during the same period and its relationship to warming the subtropical North Atlantic, the authors state.

Sources: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/584826/?sc=sphn
Permalink: http://www.newswise.com/articles/past-southern-hemisphere-rain-link-to-antarctic-temperatures

Are Drones Watching You?

By Jennifer Lynch
January 10, 2012

Today, EFF filed suit against the Federal Aviation Administration seeking information on drone flights in the United States. The FAA is the sole entity within the federal government capable of authorizing domestic drone flights, and for too long now, it has failed to release specific and detailed information on who is authorized to fly drones within US borders.

Up until a few years ago, most Americans didn’t know much about drones or unmanned aircraft. However, the U.S. military has been using drones in its various wars and conflicts around the world for more than 15 years, using the Predator drone for the first time in Bosnia in 1995, and the Global Hawk drone in Afghanistan in 2001. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US military has used several different types of drones to conduct surveillance for every major mission in the war. In Libya, President Obama authorized the use of armed Predator drones, even though we were not technically at war with the country. And most recently in Yemen, the CIA used drones carrying Hellfire missiles to kill an American citizen, the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. In all, almost one in every three U.S. warplanes is a drone, according to the Congressional Research Service. In 2005, the number was only 5%.

Now drones are also being used domestically for non-military purposes, raising significant privacy concerns. For example, this past December, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) purchased its ninth drone. It uses these drones inside the United States to patrol the U.S. borders—which most would argue is within its agency mandate—but it also uses them to aid state and local police for routine law enforcement purposes. In fact, the Los Angeles Times reported in December that CBP used one of its Predators to roust out cattle rustlers in North Dakota. The Times quoted local police as saying they “have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June.” State and local police are also using their own drones for routine law enforcement activities from catching drug dealers to finding missing persons. Some within law enforcement have even proposed using drones to record traffic violations.

Drones are capable of highly advanced and almost constant surveillance, and they can amass large amounts of data. They carry various types of equipment including live-feed video cameras, infrared cameras, heat sensors, and radar. Some newer drones carry super high resolution “gigapixel” cameras that can “track people and vehicles from altitudes above 20,000 feet[,] . . . [can] monitor up to 65 enemies of the State simultaneously[, and] . . . can see targets from almost 25 miles down range.” Predator drones can eavesdrop on electronic transmissions, and one drone unveiled at DEFCON last year can crack Wi-Fi networks and intercept text messages and cell phone conversations—without the knowledge or help of either the communications provider or the customer. Drones are also designed to carry weapons, and some have suggested that drones carrying weapons such as tasers and bean bag guns could be used domestically.

Many drones, by virtue of their design, their size, and how high they can fly, can operate undetected in urban and rural environments, allowing the government to spy on Americans without their knowledge. And even if Americans knew they were being spied on, it’s unclear what laws would protect against this. As Ryan Calo, the ACLU (pdf) and many others have noted, Supreme Court case law has not been friendly to privacy in the public sphere, or even to privacy in areas like your backyard or corporate facilities that are off-limits to the public but can be viewed from above. The Supreme Court has also held that the Fourth Amendment’s protections from unreasonable searches and seizures may not apply when it’s not a human that is doing the searching. None of these cases bodes well for any future review of the privacy implications of drone surveillance.

However, there are some reasons to hope that the courts will find the ability of drones to monitor our activities constantly, both in public and—through the use of heat sensors or other technology—inside our homes, goes too far. For example, in a 2001 case called Kyllo v. United States, the Supreme Court held the warrantless search of a home conducted from outside the home using thermal imaging violated the Fourth Amendment. The Court held that, “in the sanctity of the home, all details are intimate details”—it didn’t matter that the officers did not need to “enter” the home to “see” them. United States v. Jones, argued before the Supreme Court this term, could also have ramifications for drones. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeal’s opinion in this case held that warrantless GPS-enabled 24/7 surveillance of a car violated the Fourth Amendment, noting, “When it comes to privacy . . . the whole may be more revealing than the parts.” Though the outcome of the case at the Supreme Court is far from clear, the Court did seem surprised during oral argument that, under the government’s theory of the case, the justices themselves could be tracked without a warrant and without probable cause. Drones that use heat sensors to “see” into the home and that can track one or many people around the clock wherever they go are not much different from the technologies at issue in Kyllo and Jones.

It is likely a court will be forced to address this issue in the not-to-distant future. The market for unmanned aircraft in the United States is expanding rapidly, and companies, public entities, and research institutions are developing newer, faster, stealthier, and more sophisticated drones every year. According to a July 15, 2010 FAA Fact Sheet (pdf), “[i]n the United States alone, approximately 50 companies, universities, and government organizations are developing and producing some 155 unmanned aircraft designs.” According to one market research firm, approximately 70% of global growth and market share of unmanned aircraft systems is in the United States (pdf). In 2010 alone, expenditures on unmanned aircraft “reached more than US $3 billion (pdf) and constituted a growth of more than 12%.” The market for these systems is only expected to increase: over the next 10 years the total expenditure for unmanned aircraft “is expected to surpass US $7 billion.” And some have forecast that by the year 2018 there will be “more than 15,000 [unmanned aircraft systems] in service in the U.S., with a total of almost 30,000 deployed worldwide.”

In 2011, Congress, the Defense Department, state and local governments, industry and researchers all placed significant pressure on the FAA to review and expand its current “Certificate of Authorization or Waiver (COA)” program. The FAA is also reviewing its own rules for small unmanned aircraft systems. The agency is expected to announce an expansion of the COA program this month. If it does, we may see (or be seen by) many more drones in the very near future.

EFF will keep monitoring this issue. We hope to learn from our lawsuit against the FAA which entities in the United States—whether they are government agencies, state or local law enforcement, research institutions or private companies—are currently authorized to fly drones and which entities are seeking or have been denied authorization. Once we have that information we will be better able to define the scope of the problem and can further assess and address the privacy issues at stake. 
 

Sources: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/drones-are-watching-you
image: file
 

Administrative Note: With every weapon there come defenses and it may soon require Americans who disagree with government to equip themselves with things such as

Two Soldiers - left one without camo right one suit with in IR and other wavelengths including visible light

 "Infra-Red Countermeasures / Ghillie Suits" from Special Warrior Operations Research & Development ® (S.W.O.R.D. INC.)  which can be found at http://sword1inc.com/id13.html ... and you MeanStream Media people thought I was crazy when I said that nearly EXACTLY such named operation was actually in place at

D.A.R.P.A.

 

 called Space Warefare Operational Research Division who has a satelite problem of their own http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/01/us-army-shuttle-is-chasing-chinas-space-station/ ... what say you now?

Utah Cop Killed Because of Personal Medical Marijuana Grow

Submitted by Marijuana Policy Project
Jan 10, 2012

No family should have to deal with the consequences of the events that occurred in Ogden, Utah on January 3, 2012. So it is with great respect to the families of both Jared Francom and Matthew David Stewart, who no doubt are both dealing with incredible grief of contrasting nature, that I’m offering up these comments.

Whenever a member of law enforcement is killed in the line of duty, like Officer Jared Francom recently was, it’s a tragedy. When the “target” of the military tactical style operation that led to the shootout leaving the officer dead appears to have been a personal marijuana grow, it’s also infuriating.

At 8:40 p.m. on Wednesday, January 3, 2012, members of the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force in Ogden, Utah conducted a “knock and enter” warrant on the home of 37 year-old army veteran Matthew David Stewart. According to reports, they knocked and no one answered. When they forcefully entered his home in paramilitary style gear, with guns drawn, they encountered gunfire. When it was all said and done, one member of the task force was fatally injured, five members were wounded, Stewart was injured and faces likely charges of aggravated murder (which carries the death penalty) and multiple counts of attempted aggravated murder.

According to DEA Special Agent in Charge Frank Smith, the victims and other agents involved in this operation are heroes, and they were “protecting the public.” I tend to agree with Agent Smith, members of the task force are heroes, but in this instance, they certainly were not protecting the public.

The only public reports about why Stewart was raided indicate that Stewart had a personal, indoor marijuana grow for medical reasons. It’s been reported that Stewart suffers from PTSD and grew a small amount of marijuana to self-medicate. In addition, it has been speculated that the reason why Stewart failed to answer the knock is because he was asleep at the time. He worked the midnight shift and would typically be asleep at the time the raid was conducted.

So, it seems an army veteran who suffers from PTSD was suddenly awoken to armor-clad armed men in his home and he allegedly opened fire. The army vet now likely faces the death penalty. One officer is dead. Five wounded. Countless lives have been ruined.

I’d like Agent Smith to explain to Stewart exactly why he was a threat to the public. There has been no allegation that Steward sold marijuana, or gave it away to kids, or that he was a danger to anyone before the paramilitary-style raid on his house. In fact, his neighbors were shocked to learn that there was any drug activity in the area, dispelling the notion that Stewart was an immediate threat to anyone. Without making a fuss and without causing problems in his neighborhood, Stewart simply grew marijuana for personal medical reasons.

I’d also like Agent Smith to explain to Officer Francom’s family why Stewart’s personal medical grow warranted the over-the-top means of enforcement that has been linked to so many needless deaths and injuries.

Finally, I’d like Agent Smith to explain to everyone why — as he stated to Fox 13 News — this situation isn’t a legalization issue? Clearly, the officers involved were just doing their job. They were enforcing enacted laws that their superiors wanted enforced. However, if marijuana were legal, this and numerous other prohibition-related deaths, including the death of another Utah man at the hands of this very same task force, would never have happened.

So long as marijuana remains a law enforcement issue as opposed to a public health issue, we’ll keep seeing tragic stories like these. Officers and civilians shot, and often times killed, over a naturally occurring plant that is safer than alcohol. It’s sad and it’s sickening, and it’s about time that we finally rethink our nation’s devastating marijuana prohibition.

Sources: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/drug-law/tragedy-marijuana-prohibition-strikes-ogden-utah?utm_source=OV+Newsletter+List+2&utm_campaign=75b4ad6913-OV_Newsletter_Jan_111_11_2012

images: file

Administrative Note: Please also see:

“I Really Don’t Know How [Prohibitionists] Sleep at NightWithout the Booze.” http://ow.ly/72YeJ #Hemp #Prohibitionists #political #hyprocisy