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‘HOPE AND CHANGE’ TURNS TO RAGE

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‘HOPE AND CHANGE’ TURNS TO RAGE

A city ripped apart: Heavily-armed SWAT teams fire tear gas on demonstrators and arrest two journalists in FOURTH night of clashes over the shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown

Ferguson, Missouri, endured a fourth night of pitched battles between police and protestors
SWAT officers and 500 protestors faced-off in St. Louis suburb
Tear gas was then fired as the crowd chanted ‘Hands Up! Don’t Shoot’
Smoke bombs were also lobbed into the crowd after dark
Protestors responded by attempting to throw Molotov cocktails
Earlier two reporters were arrested and then released without charge
Demonstrations in the St Louis suburb were sparked by police shooting of an unarmed teenager Michael Brown on Saturday night
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon cancelled all appearances on Wednesday night and said he would visit Ferguson on Thursday

By JAMES NYE FOR MAILONLINE and ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORTER

PUBLISHED: 20:38 EST, 13 August 2014 | UPDATED: 16:36 EST, 14 August 2014

Heavily armed SWAT police trained their guns on the public and fired tear gas in Ferguson, Missouri, last night as racial unrest over the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teen rocked the St. Louis suburb for the fourth night running.

An estimated 500 people, who had been protesting 18-year-old Michael Brown’s death on Saturday, ignored the night curfew imposed by police and instead faced-off against officers chanting ‘Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!’

After repeatedly asking them to disperse, the riot police then fired tear gas into the crowd to break it up, causing scenes that resembled a war zone as another night of clashes was sparked between authorities and furious protestors.

The protestors that remained entered into pitched street battles with police and lobbed Molotov cocktails at the camouflage-clad officers who responded with more tears gas and smoke bombs although there were no immediate reports of injuries but at least 18 arrests.

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2724528/A-city-ripped-apart-Heavily-armed-SWAT-teams-fire-tear-gas-demonstrators-arrest-two-journalists-FOURTH-night-clashes-shooting-unarmed-18-year-old-Michael-Brown.html#ixzz3ARksSlDF 

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CNN Poll: Trust in government at all-time low

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CNN Poll: Trust in government at all-time low
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CNN Political Editor Paul Steinhauser

Washington (CNN) – Four decades after President Richard Nixon resigned, a slight majority of Americans still consider Watergate a very serious matter, a new national survey shows. But how serious depends on when you were born.

The CNN/ORC International poll’s release comes one day before the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974. With the Watergate scandal escalating, the second-term Republican president had lost much of his political backing, and he faced almost certain impeachment and the prospects of being removed from office by a Democratic-dominated House and Senate.

There’s a big generational divide over the significance of the scandal, with a majority of those older than 40 describing Watergate as a very serious problem and those under 40 saying it was just politics.

The poll also indicates that the public’s trust in government is at an all-time low.

Just 13% of Americans say the government can be trusted to do what is right always or most of the time, with just over three-quarters saying only some of the time and one in 10 saying they never trust the government, according to the poll.

“The number who trust the government all or most of the time has sunk so low that it is hard to remember that there was ever a time when Americans routinely trusted the government,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said

https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/08/08/cnn-poll-trust-in-government-at-all-time-low-2/

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Issa: More Than 20 Obama Officials ‘Lost or Destroyed’ E-mails After House Launched Probes

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Issa: More Than 20 Obama Officials ‘Lost or Destroyed’ E-mails After House Launched Probes
By Joel Gehrke
August 7, 2014 5:27 PM

The revelation that Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Marilynn Tavenner did not retain her e-mails means that more than 20 witness in the Obama administration to lose or delete e-mails without notifying Congress, according to the top House investigator.

“The Obama administration has lost or destroyed e-mails for more than 20 witnesses, and in each case, the loss wasn’t disclosed to the National Archives or Congress for months or years, in violation of federal law,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) said ofTavenner’s lost e-mails.

“It defies logic that so many senior Administration officials were found to have ignored federal recordkeeping requirements only after Congress asked to see their e-mails,” he continued. “Just this week, my staff followed up with HHS, who has failed to comply with a subpoena from ten months ago. Even at that point, the administration did not inform us that there was a problem with Ms. Tavenner’s e-mail history. Yet again, we discover that this administration will not be forthright with the American people unless cornered.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/384906/issa-more-20-obama-officials-lost-or-destroyed-e-mails-after-house-launched-probes

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New Jersey Cop: “Obama has decimated the freak’in Constitution, … so we don’t have to follow the Constitution.”

Stock Photo of the Consitution of the United States and Feather Quill

New Jersey Cop: “Obama has decimated the freak’in Constitution, … so we don’t have to follow the Constitution.”

A shocking video shows a New Jersey cop responding to a complaint about corruption by asserting that law enforcement officers no longer need to follow the Constitution because it has already been decimated by President Obama.

Seeking to file a complaint about the Helmetta Regional Animal Shelter, Steve Wronko visited the Helmetta Police Department to air his grievances about the shelter falling prey to nepotism and corruption as a result of Helmetta Mayor Nancy Martin appointing her son Brandon Metz to head up the facility.

“I’ve made objections about what’s going on at the shelter over there,” Wronko tells the police officer, adding, “My first and fourth amendment rights were violated, my civil rights were violated.”

“Obama just decimated the freakin’ Constitution, so I don’t give a damn. If he doesn’t follow the Constitution, we don’t have to,” responds the cop, brazenly violating the oath he swore to uphold the Constitution.

The comment is self-evidently shocking, but it also provides an insight as to how corruption from the very top reaches all the way down to the bottom, providing law enforcement with a twisted form of justification for their unconstitutional activities.

At the end of the video, other police officers arrive to kick Wronko out of the building, with the cop who doesn’t give a “damn” about constitutional rights stating, “Either you get out or you’re gonna get locked up.”

“Maybe this instance, captured on film for the whole world to see, will serve as a wake up call to those who may still be asleep,” writes Matt Agorist. “Please share this so that it can help others to see the leviathan for what it is, a gang of thieves writ large.”

The only question that remains is if police officers feel they no longer need to follow the Constitution, should Americans be expected to obey the law?

Video link here:

https://www.infowars.com/cop-if-obama-doesnt-follow-the-constitution-we-dont-have-to/

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Obamacare: Will Mandates for Doctors Come Next?

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Obamacare: Will Mandates for Doctors Come Next?

Central planning is replacing individual choice.

A. Barton Hinkle | August 4, 2014
The Latest Bureaucratic Nonsense from Government Regulators7.30.14 10:30 am

Foust has slammed his opponent, Republican Del. Barbara Comstock, for her opposition to expansion. He has spoken of the need to “make health care available to 400,000 Virginians,” insisting it is “the right thing to do.”

Foust’s wife, Dr. Marilyn Jerome, practices with Foxhall OB/GYN in northwest Washington, D.C. Six of its physicians made Washingtonian magazine’s list of “Top Docs,” and one of them—Nichole Pardo—was featured on the cover. Not too shabby.

The practice is notable for another reason as well: It doesn’t accept Medicaid patients.

This draws attention to an under-covered aspect of the debate over Medicaid expansion. While advocates speak of it as “making health care available” to the needy, what it really does is make coverage, rather than care, available to them. A newly enrolled Medicaid patient can get the money to pay a doctor. But can she get the doctor to take it?

On his website, Foust blasts insurance companies that “hiked insurance premiums and gouged consumers. … Insurance companies denied care to those with pre-existing conditions … and refused coverage to those who needed it most. … We cannot go back to the days when insurance companies could arbitrarily … deny coverage.” In a commentary on the Foxhall practice’s website, Dr. Jerome praises the Affordable Care Act—particularly because now “women cannot be denied insurance” and because the plan’s standards mandate coverage for a wide variety of treatments.

Doctors, however, can operate under a much different set of standards. They can deny care all they want. Statewide, roughly one in five physicians will not accept new Medicaid patients—usually because Medicaid pays only two-thirds as much as private insurance does, on average.

https://reason.com/archives/2014/08/04/obamacare-will-mandates-for-doctors-come

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Obama’s FBI to hire firm to rate ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ stories about the agency

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Obama’s FBI to hire firm to rate ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ stories about the agency

Officials mum on need for and use of such info

The FBI is hiring a contractor to grade news stories about the agency as “positive” “neutral” or “negative,” but the agency won’t say why officials need the information or what they plan to do with it.

FBI officials wouldn’t even reveal how they will go about assigning the grades, which were laid out in a recent contract solicitation. The contract tells potential bidders to “use their judgment” in scoring news coverage as part of a new “daily news briefing” service the agency is seeking as part of a contract that could last up to five years.

The move is reminiscent of a similar effort the Obama administration made to grade media coverage of its response to the BP oil spill. A separate defense contract rating reporters’ work was scrapped in 2009.

In a statement of work, the agency says its public affairs office needs a contractor to help monitor “breaking news, editorials, long-form journalism projects and the larger public conversation about law enforcement.”

But the lack of clear public methods and goals raises “troubling questions,” said Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University.

“You would certainly worry this could affect access,” he said. “It might affect the way they’re going to approach your questions, whether they’re going to be extra careful not to make news if you’re on the ‘bad list.’”

Mr. Kennedy also pointed out that journalism can be nuanced and complicated, raising questions about what sort of guidance the agency provides to contractors to fit stories into positive, neutral or negative boxes.

“If you’re rigorously fair about it and you’re getting the FBI’s point of view out there, they would probably write that as a negative story, but it strikes me as neutral,” he said.

Read more: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/3/fbi-hires-firm-to-rate-news-stories-about-the-agen/#ixzz39WHAdr1E 

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Conservatives, libertarians and liberals should all worry about the militarization of police

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Conservatives, libertarians and liberals should all worry about the militarization of police
By John Stossel
Published July 23, 2014
FoxNews.com

Reuters

I want the police to be better armed than the bad guys, but what exactly does that mean today?

Apparently it means the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security equip even the tiniest rural police departments with massive military vehicles, body armor and grenade launchers. The equipment is surplus from the long wars we fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To a hammer, everything resembles a nail. SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams were once used only in emergencies such as riots or robberies where hostages were taken. But today there are more than 50,000 “no-knock raids” a year.

Government always grows, and government is force. Force is always dangerous.

It’s not because crime got worse. There is less crime today. Crime peaked around 1990 and is now at a 40-year low. But as politicians keep passing new criminal laws, police find new reasons to deploy their heavy equipment.

Washington Post reporter Radley Balko points out that they’ve used SWAT teams to raid such threatening haunts as truck stops with video poker machines, unlicensed barber shops and a frat house where underage drinking was reported.

In New York City, these men in black raided standup comedian Joe Lipari’s apartment.

“I had bad customer service at the Apple Store,” Lipari told me in an interview for my upcoming TV special “Policing America.” “So I bitched about it on Facebook. I thought I was funny. I quoted ‘Fight Club,'” the 1999 movie about bored yuppies who attack parts of consumer culture they hate.

“People (on Facebook) were immediately responding that it was obviously from ‘Fight Club,'” says Lipari. “It was a good time, until 90 minutes later, a SWAT team knocked on my door. Everyone’s got their guns drawn.”

It took only that long for authorities to deem Lipari a threat and authorize a raid by a dozen armed men. Yet, says Lipari, “if they took 90 seconds to Google me, they would have seen I’m teaching a yoga class in an hour, that I had a comedy show.”

Lipari has no police record. If he is a threat, so are you.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/07/23/conservatives-libertarians-and-liberals-should-all-worry-about-militarization/#

The Record: Tank sheriff’s plan

https://www.northjersey.com/opinion/opinion-editorials/tank-sheriff-s-plan-1.1055114

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Scott Garrett Moves ensure the TSA doesn’t overstep its bounds Introduces the Freedom of Travel Act, which would prohibit the TSA from conducting random searches

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Scott Garrett Moves ensure the TSA doesn’t overstep its bounds Introduces the Freedom of Travel Act, which would prohibit the TSA from conducting random searches 
July 16.2014

Ridgewood NJ, Of the many revolutionary ideas that our country’s Founders included in the Constitution, the inherent rights to privacy and due process are truly unique.  Our Founders witnessed firsthand the ruin and terror that a distant, unresponsive, and ultimately tyrannical government could inflict on peaceable people as individual liberties were curtailed.  They could not tolerate such abuses, and neither should we today.

Our right to privacy must be diligently preserved, the more so since it can be so quickly taken away.  Whether it’s the NSA’s unlimited collection of Americans’ communications, the IRS’s unequal and invasive scrutiny of politically disfavored groups, or the TSA’s expansion of unwarranted airport-style screening to our streets, we as Americans owe it to ourselves to fight this barrage of privacy infringements—and that’s not an exhaustive list.

One example that I want to bring to your attention is the TSA’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) program.  VIPR teams are roving units that conduct thousands of unannounced, random sweeps of personal vehicles; bus, train, and subway stations; as well as things that have nothing to do with transportation, like football stadiums.  As you can see, these teams reach far beyond the TSA’s traditional jurisdiction of airports and aviation. To ensure the TSA doesn’t overstep its bounds, I introduced H.R. 2589, the Freedom of Travel Act, which would prohibit the TSA from conducting random searches of surface transportation passengers.

The evolution of technology has also opened up many new questions about our rights in an electronic world.  Recently, the Supreme Court unanimously defended our Fourth Amendment rights by holding that police are required to obtain a warrant before searching the cell phone data of an individual who has been arrested.  

While I believe in maintaining our country’s anti-terrorist capabilities and supporting our brave law enforcement officials, I applaud the Supreme Court for drawing a clear line that recognizes the critical privacy interest all U.S. citizens have in their mobile devices. To further this protection, I supported an amendment to the Department of Defense appropriations that would prohibit the use of any government funds for warrantless searches of your electronic communications.

Before and during the American Revolution, homes were raided, people were arrested without warrants, personal property was confiscated and destroyed, and people understandably lived in fear of the arbitrary and invasive government.  It is our duty, as Americans, to protect the civil rights that so many have fought and died for.

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Lawmakers Throw Light on Secretive ‘Operation Choke Point’

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Lawmakers Throw Light on Secretive ‘Operation Choke Point’

Kelsey Harkness / @kelseyjharkness / July 15, 2014 / 

‘No place to stop’: Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., on Operation Choke Point. (Photo: Flickr)

Is “Operation Choke Point” about to get choked by Congress? Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., sure hopes so.

Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is calling for the dismantling of what he calls a secretive initiative launched by the Obama administration in early 2013.

Critics say that Operation Choke Point, so dubbed by Department of Justice officials under Attorney General Eric Holder,  seeks to weed out businesses from the marketplace that the Obama administration considers objectionable. According to The Wall Street Journal, it was an outgrowth of the Financial Fraud Task Force, established by President Obama’s executive order early in his first term.

The initiative, Issa said last week, is a slippery slope:

“If you empower the government to pick winners and losers within a lawful enterprise, then there is no place to stop.”

Initially, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, officials targeted small-dollar, nonbank lenders. But it grew to include other legal, legitimate businesses such as gun dealers and tobacco vendors at Walmart and Bass Pro Shop.

Issa, speaking on Operation Choke Point at Cato Institute, called it “proactive, progressive activity” by government against banks and other legitimate businesses.

“Fraud should be prosecuted,” Norbert Michel, research fellow in financial regulations at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “They don’t have to use the banking system to shut out every single player in an industry to do that.”

House Republicans already have passed legislation prohibiting funding for Operation Choke Point. This week, the Justice Department initiative comes under further scrutiny in three House settings:

This morning at 10, the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee wasscheduled to hold a hearing on the Justice Department initiative.
Today at 2 p.m., the Financial Services Committee’s subcommittee on financial institutions subcommittee was set to hold a hearing on a new bill by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.), the “End Operation Choke Point Act of 2014.”
Thursday at 9:30 a.m., the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on regulatory reform will hold a hearing entitled “Guilty Until Proven Innocent?” on whether Justice has the legal authority to execute the operation and possible collateral damage to legitimate businesses.

One official at Justice, quoted anonymously in a  Wall Street Journal report last summer, said the initiative was intended to change “the structures within the financial system that allow all kinds of fraudulent merchants to operate,” with the intent of “choking them off from the very air they need to survive.”

By “air,”the DOJ means money. The Obama administration uses Operation Choke Point to intimidates banks from doing business with merchants it deems “high risk,” Issa and other critics say.

For example, Issa said in his remarks last week, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation officials make “inappropriate” phone calls to banks and payday lenders, pressuring them to sever ties with businesses the government considers “reputational risks.”

Mark Calabria, Cato’s director of financial regulation studies, said FDIC pressure is an enormous weight over the financial industry.

“When the federal government maintains the discretion to decide which bank gets rescued and which does not, it should be clear that banks in practice have little choice but to cooperate,” Calabria said.

Despite his opposition to the initiative, Issa has yet to endorse legislation to end Operation Choke Point. Instead, he said:

We’ve got to do what baseball pitchers do anytime somebody’s crowding the plate. And that is, we’re going to put the ball close enough that either they’re going to jump back, or we’re going to hit them with the ball. … What they’re doing is wrong, and we’ve got to show that.

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In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are

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In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are
BY BARTON GELLMAN, JULIE TATE AND ASHKAN SOLTANI

Files provided by Snowden show extent to which ordinary Web users are caught in the net

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by theNational Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html

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Land of the free? Not so much. Americans’ sense of freedom drops, poll finds.

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Land of the free? Not so much. Americans’ sense of freedom drops, poll finds.

Americans are feeling ‘less satisfied with the freedom to choose what to do with their lives,’ according to a Gallup poll. The trend could be linked to a perceived rise in corruption.

By Gram Slattery, Staff writer

This Independence Day, Americans will celebrate the nation’s core values, especially freedom. But according to a new international poll, Americans have become significantly “less satisfied with the freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives.”

Seventy-nine percent of US residents are satisfied with their level of freedom, down from 91 percent in 2006, according to the Gallup survey, released Tuesday.

That 12 point drop pushes the US from among the highest in the world in terms of perceived freedom to 36th place, outside the top quartile of the 120 countries sampled, trailing Paraguay, Rwanda, and the autonomous region of Nagarno-Karabakh.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2014/0701/Land-of-the-free-Not-so-much.-Americans-sense-of-freedom-drops-poll-finds

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America’s expanding police state

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America’s expanding police state
Neighborhood cops are becoming armed soldiers
By Tammy Bruce
Friday, June 20, 201

With so much happening internationally and the number of scandals, crises and general screw-ups of the Obama administration here at home, it’s worth noting a disturbing development here on the domestic front: a rapidly expanding police state.

On my radio program last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Cheryl Chumley, a reporter for The Washington Times, about her new book, “Police State USA: How George Orwell’s Nightmare is Becoming our Reality.” The title says it all, and aptly describes the shocking transformation of what had been our free society.

We all know about the scope of National Security Agency (NSA) spying. It’s fair to say at this point in our lives that the notion of privacy is all but dead and gone. However, it didn’t start there. In her book, Mrs. Chumley takes us on a ride through history, reminding us of the original intentions of the Founding Fathers versus the assault on the original design by “21st century realities.”

Keep in mind, people in the political class constantly reveal their contempt for regular citizens. That contempt is the inevitable result of a group of people who have convinced themselves that big government is necessary because the little people can’t control their own lives.

These same politicians and bureaucrats then begin to see themselves a genuinely better than everyone else. After all, if they were just like us, then they’d be part of the rabble, and they can’t have that. The solution to their dilemma is a police state.

Mrs. Chumley’s chapters in “Police State USA” provide a treatise on all the elements of society that are under attack as big government seeks to sustain itself through a police state, including aspects of an expanding and increasingly paranoid bureaucratic system that has decided the individual is the problem.

Read more: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/20/bruceraising-a-police-state-army/#ixzz35GDNh6iR

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N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images

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N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images

By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRASMAY 31, 2014


The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html?_r=0

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Click It or Ticket campaign in N.J. is looking for more than seat belts

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file photo Boyd Loving

Click It or Ticket campaign in N.J. is looking for more than seat belts

MAY 23, 2014, 11:19 PM    LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, MAY 23, 2014, 11:52 PM
BY DAVE SHEINGOLD
STAFF WRITER
THE RECORD

The yearly Click It or Ticket campaign aimed at increasing seat-belt use is turning into a catchall for police departments across New Jersey, which are writing more tickets for violations such as hand-held cellphone use, expired registrations and reckless driving, than for failing to buckle up, according to state data.

As studies show that more and more New Jersey drivers are buckling up, the number of seat-belt summonses issued by police departments funded by the federal program has dropped, and tickets issued for other infractions have soared during the annual two-week campaign, raising questions about whether the effort still serves its stated purpose..

An analysis by The Record of statewide Click It or Ticket data found that police wrote 20,000 tickets to seat-belt and child-restraint scofflaws state­wide under the program in 2013, down by more than half from the 53,200 written in 2007. At the same time, the number handed out for all other violations has jumped from 33,400, to 44,000. As a result, only about 30 percent of tickets written under the program now are issued for seat-belt infractions.

Police departments in Hackensack, South Hackensack, Garfield, Northvale and the city of Passaic are among those in Bergen and Passaic counties seeing significant drop-offs.

– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/click-it-or-ticket-campaign-in-n-j-is-looking-for-more-than-seat-belts-1.1022775#sthash.7C9GkBPN.dpuf

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CHRISTIE’S QUID PRO QUO: WILL IT CHANGE DIRECTION OF TOP COURT?

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CHRISTIE’S QUID PRO QUO: WILL IT CHANGE DIRECTION OF TOP COURT?

t’s unclear whether the renomination of state Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner will change the direction of the New Jersey’s highest court.

But Gov. Chris Christie’s action yesterday, taken as part of a deal to add a Republican to the bench, resolves a question that had concerned the state’s legal community. Some, however, say it does not negate the need for a constitutional amendment essentially giving judges lifetime tenure to ensure the continued independence of the state’s judiciary. (O’Dea/NJSpotlight)

https://www.njspotlight.com/stories/14/05/22/christie-s-quid-pro-quo-will-it-change-direction-of-top-court/