House Votes to Make Protest Near Secret Service Illegal

The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011 passed the House 388-to-3 this past Monday. It already passed the Senate back on February 6th.

The bill will give prosecutors the broad powers to charge anyone who enters any building or grounds without permission or with the intent to disrupt a government function with a federal offense if the Secret Service is present.

This bill essentially makes it illegal to protest anyone being protected by the Secret Service.

Hours after the act passed, presidential candidate Rick Santorum was granted Secret Service protection, GOP hopeful Mitt Romney has already been receiving such security and it was confirmed last week to CBS News that presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has sought Secret Service protection as well. Even former contender Herman Cain received the armed protection when he was still in the running for the nomination. So not only would it be illegal to protest the president or any elected official under the protection of the Secret Service but even presidential candidates could ask for and get tax payer paid protection from any expression of dissent.

The law is intended to be used against anyone who knowingly enters or remains in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so. Those grounds are considered any area where someone, whether it’s President Obama, Senator Santorum or Governor Romney, will be temporarily visiting, whether or not the public is made aware. Entering such a facility is thus outlawed, as is disrupting the orderly conduct of “official functions,” engaging in disorderly conduct “within such proximity to” the event or acting violent to anyone, anywhere near the premises.

Under those terms a peaceful protest outside a candidate’s concession speech would be considered a federal offense.

Beyond the president, elected officials and presidential candidates, the Secret Service often protects visiting heads of state as well as events deemed to be of national significance by the Department of Homeland Security. Past such events defined as a National Special Security Event (NSSE) include the funerals of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, most State of the Union addresses, the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions and Super Bowl XXXVI.

One of only three lawmakers to vote against the act on Monday, Rep. Justin Amash explained his vote on his Facebook page.

“The bill expands current law to make it a crime to enter or remain in an area where an official is visiting even if the person does not know it’s illegal to be in that area and has no reason to suspect it’s illegal. Some government officials may need extraordinary protection to ensure their safety. But criminalizing legitimate First Amendment activity, even if that activity is annoying to those government officials, violates our rights,”.

Rep. Amash also included a link to an article covering the passage of the bill as an example of how the public is being mislead about the legislation. You can the read the whitewashed coverage of this bill here http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/212873-house-approves-white-house-trespass-bill-sends-to-obama

Interpol Says Suspected Anonymous Hackers Arrested

Interpol said Tuesday that 25 suspected members of the loose-knit Anonymous hacker movement were arrested in Europe and South America.

The arrests took place in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain.

The suspects are accused of planning coordinated cyberattacks targeting Colombia’s defense ministry and presidential websites, Chile’s Endesa electricity company and national library, as well as other targets.

An ongoing investigation that begun in mid-February led to the seizure of 250 pieces of IT equipment and mobile phones Interpol said.

In Chile’s capital, Subprefect Jamie Jara announced at a news conference that authorities arrested five Chileans and a Colombian. Two of the Chileans are 17-year-old minors.

Prosecutor Marcos Mercado, computer crimes, said the suspects were charged with altering websites, including that of Chile’s National Library, and engaging in denial-of-service attacks on websites of the electricity companies Endesa and Hidroaysen. The charges carry a penalty of 541 days to five years in prison.

“For now, we have not established that they have had any special communications among themselves,” said Jara.

Spanish authorities announced, early Tuesday, the arrest of four suspected Anonymous hackers in connection with attacks on Spanish political party websites. Two servers used by the group in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have been blocked. The alleged manager of Anonymous’ computer operations in Spain and Latin America, was among those arrested and was identified only by his initials and the aliases “Thunder” and “Pacotron.”

The four are suspected of defacing websites, carrying out denial-of-service attacks and publishing data on police assigned to the royal palace and the premier’s office online.

Interpol is headquartered in Lyon, France. The organization has no powers of arrest or investigation but it helps police forces around the world work together, facilitating intelligence sharing.

A tweet associated with Anonymous’ Brazilian wing posted a message to Interpol.

It read “Interpol, you can’t take Anonymous, It’s an idea.”

Student Loan Interest Rates Set to Double This July

There’s a ominous countdown clock ticking away for college students across the U.S. this year. When time runs out on July 1, 2012, student loan interest rates will double for almost 8 million students.

Students will end up paying a hefty $5,000 more on their student loans than they otherwise would.

In the past five years, the federal government has made unprecedented investments in student aid to help students afford colleges. One of those investments was the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007. The new law gradually cut interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans, which account for almost half of all federal student loans. Subsidized Stafford loans are given to borrowers based on need, and are ‘subsidized’ because the federal government pays the interest on the loan while the student is enrolled. The interest rate on this loan was cut from a 6.8 percent fixed interest in 2007 to 3.4 percent fixed interest through the 2011-2012 academic year.

The Obama administration has pledged to keep these interest loans low, but the one question not a lot of people seem to asking is why is college so expensive in the first place?

Well Vice President Joe Biden, who apparently doesn’t now the definition of irony, has the answer.

 

A conundrum indeed.

Orders for U.S. Manufactured Goods at 3 Year Low

Demand for goods manufactured in the U.S. fell in January to it’s lowest in three years.

Durable goods orders dropped 4.0 percent, the largest such drop since January 2009 when the country was still stuck in a deep recession, which many analysts claim is over, according to Commerce Department data on Tuesday.

“What we are seeing is that that the buildup of inventory that made third quarter GDP so strong is beginning to crest. We are seeing a slowdown in domestic demand for equipment and also slower overseas demand,” said Christopher Low, chief economist for FTN Financial.

“Also significant is the tax break on capital investment in 2011 is no longer there in 2012,” Low said.

Economists more than missed the mark with predictions that orders would only fall by 1.0 percent.

Durable goods range anywhere from toasters to big-ticket items like aircraft which are meant to last three years and more. Excluding transportation, orders fell 3.2 percent. Economists had expected that reading to be flat.

Machinery orders dropped 10.4 percent which is also the highest since January 2009.

Non-defense capital goods orders excluding aircraft saw it’s biggest drop in a year, by4.5 percent.

Boeing received 150 orders for aircraft during the month, down from 287 in December, according to the companies website.

Orders for motor vehicles edged up 0.9 percent.

Shipments of non-defense capital goods orders excluding aircraft, which go into the calculation of gross domestic product, fell 3.1 percent in January, the biggest decline since April 2009.

 

U.S. Intelligence Agencies Have No Evidence That Iran is Building a Bomb

Recent assessments by U.S. spy agencies have remained consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that found that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years early. Officials say that 2007 assessment was reaffirmed in a 2010National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

There is agreement among American, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran has been enriching nuclear fuel and developing the necessary infrastructure to become a nuclear power. What is supposedly unclear though is whether Iran will resume their program, which was halted in 03, to develop a nuclear warhead. Iranian officials maintain that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes.

In Senate testimony on Jan. 31, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, stated that U.S. officials believe that Iran is preserving its options for a nuclear weapon, but that there was no evidence that it had made a decision one way of the other.

“They are certainly moving on that path, but we don’t believe they have actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Clapper told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have made similar statements in recent television appearances.

Israeli officials have challenged the 2007 intelligence assessment, saying they do not believe that Iran ever fully halted its work on a weapons program.

U.S. analysts acknowledge that these assessments are based on limited information. David A. Kay, who was head of the C.I.A.’s team that searched for Iraq’s weapons programs after the United States invasion, was cautious about the quality of the intelligence of the current American assessment.

“They don’t have evidence that Iran has made a decision to build a bomb, and that reflects a real gap in the intelligence,” Mr. Kay said. “It’s true the evidence hasn’t changed very much” since 2007, he added. “But that reflects a lack of access and a lack of intelligence as much as anything.”

Despite clear evidence of a weapons program Iran’s enrichment activities have raised suspicions, even among skeptics.

“What has been driving the discussion has been the enrichment activity,” said one former intelligence official. “That’s made everybody nervous. So the Iranians continue to contribute to the suspicions about what they are trying to do.”

 

 

 

Obama Administration Helps Pay for NYPD Muslim Surveillance

Millions of dollars have been given to the New York City Police Department, from the White House, that was used to put entire American Muslim neighborhoods under surveillance.

The federal grants were intended to help law enforcement fight drug crimes. Since 9/11 the Bush and Obama administrations have provided $135 million to New York and New Jersey law enforcement authorities through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, known as HIDTA.

Some of that money, how much is unknown, paid for the vehicles that plainclothes NYPD officers used to conduct surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods. It also paid for computers that store information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events.

The AP confirmed the use of White House money through secret police documents and interviews with current and former city and federal officials. The AP also obtained electronic documents with digital signatures indicating they were created and saved on HIDTA computers. The HIDTA grant program is overseen by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The White House last week declined to comment on its grant payments and refused to either endorse or condemn the NYPD programs it helps pay for.

New Jersey’s governor and the mayor of its largest city have complained about the NYPD’s widespread surveillance there, outside New York’s police jurisdiction.

“I am shocked to hear that federal dollars may have helped finance the NYPD’s misguided efforts to spy on Muslims in America,” said Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., one of 34 members of Congress who have asked the Justice Department and House Judiciary Committee to investigate the NYPD.

The connection between NYPD and the White House anti-drug grant program surfaced years ago, during a long-running civil rights lawsuit against police. Civil rights attorneys asked in court about a “demonstration debriefing form” that police used whenever they arrested people for civil disobedience. The form carried the seal of both the NYPD Intelligence Division and HIDTA.

After the revelation of an extensive program to monitor Muslims in Newark, N.J., police there denied knowing about it. The Newark police director at the time, Garry McCarthy, has since moved on to lead Chicago’s police department where President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is now the mayor.

“We don’t do that in Chicago and we’re not going to do that,” Emanuel said last week.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the NYPD surveillance in his state was “disturbing” and has asked the attorney general to investigate. Christie was New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor and sat on the HIDTA executive board during 2006 and 2007 when the NYPD was conducting surveillance in New Jersey cities. Christie said he didn’t know that, in 2007, the NYPD tracked every mosque and Muslim business in Newark, the state’s largest city.

“I kind of think I would have remembered that,” he said on Fox Business News last week.

 

 

 

Rick Santorum ‘JFK speech on separation of church and state makes me want to throw up’

With the kind of comments Rick Santorum’s has been making on the campaign trail from how going to college makes you a freedom hating socialist, to why women shouldn’t be able to use contraceptives to how gay marriage destabilizes society you would think Mr. Santorum was auditioning for the role of American Taliban rather president of the United States.

Santorum’s latest statement is one you would imagine even his most ardent supporters would have to do a double take on.

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute,” he told ‘This Week’ host George Stephanopoulos. “The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country…to say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up.”

The GOP candidate was responding to comments he made last October. He had said that he “almost threw up” after reading JFK’s 1960 speech in which he declared his commitment to the separation of church and state.

Santorum also on Sunday told Meet The Press host David Gregory that separation of church and state was “not the founders’ vision.”

Except that it was.

Last week he questioned President Obama’s faith.

“[Obama believes in] some phony ideal, some phony theology … not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology,” he said.

WikiLeaks Publishing The Global Intelligence Files

From WikiLeaks:

 

“LONDON—Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods”

Read more at http://www.wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html

Michigan Tea Partier Says Getting College Education is Communism

Rick Santorum believes that President Obama’s plan to make college more accessible is just a plan to brainwash people into becoming liberals.

Most rationale people understand that at best these type of assertions are just hyperbole meant to rile up the GOP base and also at best are a clear demonstration as to why someone like Santorum is clearly un-electable.

But for the tea party crowd gathered at the Americans For Prosperity rally, Santorum’s words about higher education were right on target.

“President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum said. “What a snob!”

Santorum started by saying some people don’t require college to be successful.

“Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands.” He then went on to imply that Obama’s push to get more Americans to attend college was some kind of sinister plot.

“There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor… That’s why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image,” Santorum said. “I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

“I thought that was brilliant,” said Angie Clement of Commerce, Mich. “Not everybody has to go to college. We need garbagemen, we need welders, carpenters.”

“Everybody can’t be equal,” agreed Paul Murrow of Milford, MI seated nearby. “Somebody needs to do the manual labor.”

Clement’s husband, Stephen, said Santorum was right on the mark when he said that Obama wants to send kids to get college degrees to create more liberals.

“It starts down at the elementary school level with all this bullshit about diversity, pardon my French,” he said. “Diversity and sensitivity and all that crap. That’s the stuff that needs to be taught at home not by my teachers. My teachers need to be academic: Math, science, history, social studies, that sort of thing and keep political opinions out of it, bottom line.”

Stephen and Angie are middle-aged. Stephen said his two step kids are grown and one, his stepson, went to the University of Michigan and got an engineering degree, “but now he’s not using it. And that’s his choice.”

“I think he’s saying, ‘Do you think that that’s the only way you can be a successful person? To go to college?’” said another attendee, Elizabeth, who didn’t want her last name used. “That is snobbery. In this entrepreneurial country that we have, where fortunes are made in a lot of ways, they’re not only made by college-educated people.”

They all agreed that college can help some people, but they also believe that universities brainwash individuals into socialists.

“They try and disguise it with, you know, ‘equal opportunity’…” Stephen Clement began.

“It’s communism,” Murrow said, cutting him off. “The professors are all teaching the kids…”

“Where does the social engineering stop?” Clement added. “Does it stop after we send everybody to college, or does it stop after we set their curriculum and said, ‘these are the things you’re allowed to study?’ Does it become the Soviet Union?”

Reddit Drafts “The Freedom of Internet Act”

Unsatisfied with Washington’s parade of corporate sell-out politicians, Reddit users have taken it upon themselves to draft legislation in place of SOPA and PIPA. Using a Google Doc open for anyone to help write and edit, they’ve come up with a draft version of “The Freedom of Internet Act”.

The act addresses some basic tenets they’ve set forth, but these proclamations are subject to change as this is a living document:

• Censorship – No government of any form presiding over any land, people, or assets in any form within the United States of America shall pass any law, nor ratify any treaty, which imposes or administers any kind of censorship on the Internet, except content found to be illegal content in accordance with this act.
• Culpability – Only the creator or uploader of data is responsible for whether that data is legal to upload, possess or make available to other users or information services.
• Restrictions on the Internet - No federal union or sovereign state may pass unilateral restrictions on the Internet.
• Content removal - Notice must be given to an administrator of the information system and to the uploader of the content within at least 30 days in advance of any deletion of data from any information system or service, or within 24 hours of the transfer of the data in question from publicly accessible storage to privately accessible storage.
• Judicial proceedings - Anyone undergoing judicial proceedings based on this document must be judged in the courts of the nation where the alleged offence was committed.
• Appropriate punishment - TBD
• Rights of the user – Addresses right to anonymity, privacy, use of proxies, encryption without fear of discrimination or suspicion.
• Liability and Settlement of Copyright Infringement Claim - All calculations related to this are to be carried out in a consumer, retail, individual level pricing upon which the production cost, marketing cost will not influence, capped at 200% of calculated damage.

The sub-Reddit page for FIA is located here, where it was created by a user named “RoyalwithCheese22”

The act seeks to protect transformative works taken from copyrighted materials, such as mash-ups, memes and other types of content shared on sites like Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. It also aims to address issues at an international level not just in the U.S.

1) If an individual resided in more than one country when committing violation(s) of this document, they shall be judged based on their physical location at the time of the offence.

2) The individual in question may demand extradition to their country of residence or citizenship, where they must then be tried for the listed offences. The court proceeding shall judge the crime as if the offence had been committed in his country of residence or citizenship during the event of the crime.

3) No person is to be extradited, deported or forced to leave, nor forcibly taken from a country for the need of legal proceedings. Any legal proceeding must be conducted in the country of which the crime was committed.