A Public Service Announcement

In today's day and age with all the incidents of identity theft and fraud I was rather surprised to hear about this but here it is for one and all.

Voterrecords.com

Believe it or not the states of Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Utah, and Washington all provide their voter registration rolls to this website registered by Godaddy.com. 

I was surprised when it was brought to my attention that my full legal name, date of birth, home address (with handy accompanying Google map), phone number, etc. were all available online to anyone, whatever their purpose, to use as they see fit; Try to persuade me to vote for Hillary or perhaps just open a Macy's card so they can buy their little woman pretty things.

I did a little playing around and now know Silverfiddle's full middle name (if I knew it before I must have forgotten, but I know it now!).  It also listed his wife and daughter.  I looked up an old buddy of mine from Rhode Island and can assure you he's a decent man... as he has both his parents living with him (a fact I didn't know until I used this website).  

Now yes, in many states voter registration rolls are public records... but the laws governing such things are ancient and decrepit, predating felonious people taking out credit cards in your name, all online without benefit of Id checks or any of that silly nonsense.

If you live in one of the states listed above it might be beneficial if you were to log in, search yourself, click on your name... and when the page comes up, scroll down to the bottom and opt-out.  They will ask for an email address, but I keep a valid one handy that I never go into for just this very purpose... giving nosy people an email address that they will accept while never having to be bothered with it again. This won't get your name off the website but it will at least reduce your address down to your town/zipcode, get rid of your phone number, and reduce your date of birth to only the year.

 

Imagine if you will...

Photo: Chen-Pan Liao

Imagine if you will that it's 1950, 1960, 1970, or 1980, in fact any year before 1984 will work.

You get up in the morning at 0623 get in a shower set to 114 degrees for 12 minutes.  You remove 2 eggs, some bacon, and orange juice from your refrigerator.  You have toast... medium light.  Unbeknownst to you all of this information is being recorded by a third party.  You get in your car at precisely 0725 and head to the train station, your route, turn by turn being annotated in a ledger.  You buy a ticket on the 0745 train, and find a seat.  Someone looking over your shoulder takes note of every article you read.

At work you spend 73.4% of your time actually working, everything you do is monitored and recorded.  On the way home you go to the mall, you are followed from store to store, not only what you buy is recorded but everything you look at as well.  Finally home you kick back on the couch with a TV dinner and watch only 23 minutes of the news (you change the channel after the weather), everything you watch, the commercials you flip away from, all of it is recorded.  At the end of the day you get into bed at precisely 2117 PM.

For those of you old enough to remember... how would you have felt about the society described?  A society in which all of your activities are monitored, scrutinized, and analyzed.  Everywhere you go, everything you do, everything you buy (and how much and how you paid for it), EVERYTHING, is tracked.

That society exists today.  If I asked you thirty or forty years ago to allow me to attach a tracking device to you, chances are you would have gotten fairly upset... today, we carry them willingly.  They are in our phones, our cameras, our cars.  Didn't get NAV? Doesn't matter your car is still equipped with a GPS... OnStar, Sync, Access Assist, every vehicles has the equipment whether you subscribe to the service or not. How do you think GM knows where to send the police if you're in an accident and unable to press the button? Disabled the GPS on your phone? Doesn't matter the phone can be tracked based on the cell towers it is in communication with.  

You don't even need to go online, if you make a purchase with anything but cash everything about it, time of day, amount spent, what items you purchased can be assigned to your name and tracked. If you have a credit card with RFID not only what you purchased can be tracked but how long you spent in front of a particular display can be tracked... ever wonder how come you get bombarded with ads for a product you didn't purchase?  Well, you simply spent too long in front of the Balsamic Vinegar shelf.

The time is not far off when you can get a complete inventory of what is in your house, your refrigerator, your kitchen cabinets at any given time, the technology exists today. General Mills most likely knows what you buy already, in the not to distance future they'll know if and when their products are in your home and whether you bought and ate that box of Cheerios or whether it's still up there lingering in some dark corner of your kitchen, uneaten and unappreciated.

Welcome to the future! Hope you like it.

Just a Few Simple Questions...

1. How many times have you had sex (including oral) in the last three months?

2. With how many different people have you had sex (including oral) in the last three months?

3. If you had sex (including oral) in the last three months, how many times had you been drinking alcohol?

4. If you had sex (including oral) in the last three months, how many times had you used a condom?

Find these questions a bit over the top?  These are questions being asked USC students in a mandatory Title IX course, Title IX being the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded educational activity.

5. How many of you think the answer to all these questions should be "none of your effing business"?

Here's a good question based on the article by Campus Reform

6. Given that a drunk person cannot consent to sex, if a drunk man and a drunk woman have sex... who's at fault?  

The interactive training video associated with the course automatically blames the man as being guilty of a sexual assault. 

Welcome to the 21st Century! If you respect your own privacy and think that this entire subject is none of the schools business, well then you're not deserving of an education and will have a registration hold placed on you until you wise up and comply.

7. How many of you think USC is so far out of line that it's not even funny anymore? 

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post 24 hours ago the USC senior vice president for administration has apologized for the questions and has said they will be removed.

California gets it Right?

California lawmakers approve measure restricting the use of drones over private property by a 43-11 vote.

State Bill 142 introduced by Sen Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) would make flying a drone less than 350 feet over private property a trespass violation.

A person wrongfully occupies real property and is liable for damages pursuant to Section 3334 if, without express permission of the person or entity with the legal authority to grant access or without legal authority, he or she operates an unmanned aircraft or unmanned aircraft system less than 350 feet above ground level within the airspace overlaying the real property.

The bill now heads to the California Senate.

 LA Times 

 Bill Text

No Glassholes Allowed

 

And the fight begins.  

There is a script available to knock Google Glasses off your local network and a device called Cyborg Unplug that can knock selected devices off your network... or apparently (shhhh) any network. 

CNN

As wearable devices and audio/video recording becomes miniaturized and widespread many questions are raised regarding the legality and propriety of using such devices.  Laws vary widely from state to state and country to country.  What do you think?

Wherever you go

Your Phone Goes With You

Exploiting the SS7 network

 

The tracking technology takes advantage of the lax security of SS7, a global network that cellular carriers use to communicate with one another when directing calls, texts and Internet data.

Users of such technology type a phone number into a computer portal, which then collects information from the location databases maintained by cellular carriers, company documents show. In this way, the surveillance system learns which cell tower a target is currently using, revealing his or her location to within a few blocks in an urban area or a few miles in a rural one.  

Washington Post

Take a Good Look in the Mirror

We're not violating your privacy... the server is.

Google scanning emailed photos -Washington Post

Google, You have no expectation of privacy - Business Insider

Yahoo, Google, and Apple claim right to read email - Guardian

Microsoft defends right to read email - CNN

Well you get the idea.  The government doesn't have to violate your privacy, they can get companies to do it for them.

 

 

You're not my nanny...

and, You're Fired.

Information compiled by data brokers from public records and credit card transactions can reveal where a person shops, the food they buy, and whether they smoke. The largest hospital chain in the Carolinas is plugging data for 2 million people into algorithms designed to identify high-risk patients, while Pennsylvania’s biggest system uses household and demographic data.

MSN

Bloomberg 

Is this really where we want to go?

Do you want your healthcare provider monitoring your purchases?  If my doctor called to discuss say, the amount of bacon I purchased, or alcohol, or even cigars, that would be it.  End of business relationship, and I would tell them in choice words that shouldn't be reprinted here.

We really need to stand up and let these companies know we are not going to tolerate these practices and are not going to do business with them if that is the way they operate.  Of course, the vast majority of us are mere lemmings, enthralled by the convenience of a Visa or Discover card, so you know nothing's going to happen and nothing's going to change.  Mores the shame. 

Impersonating a Cell Phone Tower

When this

ACLU

 Looks like this

Photo: Joe Ravi

We've talked about this before

In an ACLU case in Florida, in order to prevent access to records and in violation of both Florida law and the courts, the US Marshals Service swept into a Florida police station and seized records pertaining to the use of Stingray.

In other cases the federal government has invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent the release of records, despite the fact that the use of Stingray had nothing to do with homeland security.

Wired

Stingray

Stingrays “emulate a cellphone tower” and “force” cell phones to register their location and identifying information with the stingray instead of with real cell towers in the area.

Stingrays can track cell phones whenever the phones are turned on, not just when they are making or receiving calls.

Police State

From cellphones to landlines, Google to Facebook, Twitter to email, the NSA to the US Marshals Service, each perhaps taken alone seemingly innocent and reasonable, you need to ask yourself one question...

When do all of these small individual acts become " a long train of abuses and usurpations, each pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under Absolute Despotism"?

Justice, Integrity, and Service my Ass!

 

The Ends do not Justify the Means

There is a very good interview with former director of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, in the New Yorker.

Metadata is the least intrusive, most efficient way to do it. You don’t want to translate millions and millions of calls; you want to get to the most efficient approach.

I think that statement illustrates the mindset most effectively.  It's not that we don't want to listen in to all your phone calls, it's just not efficient.  So what does that mean?  Will they record and translate millions and millions of calls if the efficiency improves?

To me, the question isn't whether or not these programs work, as they undoubtedly do, and well, the question is it worth it?  Is it worth it sacrificing the foundational principles of our nation for a little safety?  Face it, your chances of being killed by a fellow American are much higher than of being killed by a terrorist, why stop with them?  Seriously, if your goal is safety, we have the technology to assure it.  

Why do you find it tolerable to sacrifice your freedoms, your privacy to eliminate a remote threat but not to eliminate a more probable one? 

But I do think people need to know that we’re at greater risk, and there’s a lot more coming my way. It’s easy to stir up public emotion by saying: They’re listening to your phone calls. They’re reading your e-mails.  

It's also easy to stir up public emotion by saying: The Boogieman is coming.

Think about it. 

 

The Thanksgiving TSA Opt-Out Week!

By Hugh Farnham

It's that time of the year again.  Dragging your roll-around through terminals, the lines, the bad airline food and... getting a nude-ray photo of your body courtesy of the Federal Government. 

 

Most citizens don't know it is their right to "opt out" of going through the millimeter ray scanner.

 

These nude-ray scanners have a very salty past and there are many reasons to say "No":  

 

-   Potentially these scanners, especially the X-Ray backscatter units, could contribute to a higher risk of cancer

 

-  Having the Federal Government take a naked photo of you is a gross violation of your 4th Amendment rights (and no, I don't believe the machines immediately erase the photos)

 

-  The procurement of these machines is a scandal in itself, with Chertoff, the former head of DHS, working as a lobbyist to get these funded

 

- The TSA is more about getting compliance and submission than actually finding terrorists.  After billions spent, how many real rabid terrorists have they found?  0.

As you go through the security screening line, if you are told to go through the scanner simply say "I exercise my right to Opt Out".  The TSA screener is then bound to honor your request and you will be sent through secondary screening.  Without the X-Rays.

In 2010, when the Opt Out Week first started, the TSA shut down the scanner machines rather than face confrontation over the use of them.  We will see what they do this year.  Please share your experiences here at Western Hero.

Travel safe and happy holidays to all our readers of Western Hero!