Most folks don’t know just how much information the government collects on them … all of it being coordinated by Obama officials charged with documenting inequities so their administrative actions can redirect wealth and privilege as they see fit.
The role of Google in liberal politics – especially President Obama’s campaign – is highlighted in this article. Besides providing cash, they provided big infrastructure and small nuances (times millions of searches) to influence consumers of political news and activate voters – at least ones who would produce the right outcomes.
That’s the message of government if we go by its actions, as flagged in commentary on the role of government. “Regulations and rules are making it harder to do the right thing.”
Stanford law professor Peter Berkowitz describes where political correctness has brought our campuses in America – an unconstitutional and “illiberal fantasy world” in which policies for handling allegations of sexual assault “harms women as well as men”.
What comes across in his article is that academia is building a liberal ‘shadow government’ which takes to itself the role of investigation, prosecution and punishment, but without authorities nor constitutional checks and balances. Is College Park immune? No. All undergraduates this year are required to take and pass an on-line sexual assault training course which teaches that the first step in responding to an assault is not to call 911 or contact police, but contact the appropriate campus office to enable them to take up their extra-legal processes.
The commentary from Berkowitz is especially striking in that it posts at the same time that the debunked one-in-five statistic – the much-cited number of women sexually assault on college campuses – is called out as obviously incorrect: “The rise and fall of the distractingly false claim that “one in five women is sexually assaulted in college” is the biggest math story of the year.”
We will be waiting to see what update to campus training is issued.
Baltimore police obviously use invasive and sophisticated cell phone tracking technologies – but refuse to reveal them, even to a judge. Quoting the linked article
“You can’t contract out of constitutional disclosure obligations,” Wessler said. “A secret written agreement does not invalidate the Maryland public records law [and] does not invalidate due process requirements of giving information to a criminal defendant.”
Previously we noted the concerns over federal funding for study of social networking and internet memes. The concern expressed at that time was simple. Quoting the article:
The Truthy team says this research could be used to “mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.”
Federal creation of tools for tracking so-called hate speech or propaganda is the necessary first step to the control of speech and propaganda, and some feel that the government simply should not be playing in that space (though it isn’t like there aren’t many private studies actively moving forward in this area.)
That message obviously struck a nerve, as a collection of top computer science and industry groups quickly rallied to defend the funding of the Truthy project, run by a principle investigator who, in his off-campus personae, comfortably pattern matches as a left wing extremist who is concerned about finding ways to clamp down on hate speech, which by his definition includes conservative commentary.
Legal wrangling over NSA’s blanket collection of meta-data on citizen phone activities continues, this time in a federal appellate court. This will clearly continue at least until the case hits the Supreme Court (and maybe even then!)
Mother Jones reports on Facebook’s research in creating a get out the vote tool … for left-of-center candidates and issues.
What a splendid bit of data analysis!
A group has discovered by comparison of voter registration records and jury duty statements how many thousands of people in the state are listed as voting yet, elsewhere, having stated they are not citizens. It can’t be both, and the discrepancy illustrates that a federal crime has been committed one way or the other.
‘Structuring’ is the act of breaking up a sequence of cash deposits in order to try to keep them under a $10,000 threshold for reporting details to the feds. And when feds think you’ve done this, they simply take the cash. Whether or not it was tied with crime, and independent of any valid reasons for why you came by it.
There is no news here – just more examples of big government abuses.