Trump Internet Trolls Upset Over Gutting of Online Privacy

I'm less than thrilled with the Republican move to gut online privacy protections put in place under the Obama administration.   Der Trumpenführer has promised to sign the GOP passed legislation. Some have argued that the move will be a boon for the FBI.  Meanwhile Verizon, Comcast and others will be racking in the cash.  Ironically, some Trump supporters are up in arms and, if you think about it, rightly so.  All those Trump supporters frequently white supremacist websites will have their data tracked and sold.  Even more humorous is that fact that all the evangelical Christians in the South - you know, the anti-LGBT "godly folk" who use more Internet porn than anyone else - will likewise have their Internet usage tracked and sold (one can only hope they get some "interesting" marketing materials mailed to them via the Postal Service!).  Lastly, there are the true political trolls at sites like Free Republic and other wacko right wing sites who will similarly be tracked.  As Think Progress reports, many of these deplorables are not happy.  Here are excerpts:

Of all the constituencies that supported Donald Trump last November—working class white voters; anti-establishmentarians; the Ku Klux Klan—perhaps none displayed more unwavering, unyielding loyalty than his army of online trolls.

You know the ones: the Pepe-loving, hashtag-tweeting deplorables. They weaponized memes the way political operatives typically weaponize phone banks, and their effectiveness was rewarded by the loving embrace of Donald Trump himself, who bent over backwards to engage with the internet’s most vile users.

Even as some voters began expressing remorse for entrusting a misogynistic failed businessman with improving their health care and saving jobs, Trump’s army of trolls—on 4chan, on gab.ai, and, most notably, on the r/The_Donald subreddit—remained steadfast.

At least, until this week.

Earlier this week, Republicans muscled a bill through Congress that strips away Obama-era protections on users’ online privacy, opening the door for internet service providers to begin selling their customers’ private information to the highest bidder. Everything from a user’s location to their shopping habits to their browsing history will be on the menu.

For a group of people whose cretinous online behavior is predicated on remaining largely anonymous, such a disruption would be unwelcome to say the least. And the fact that the Trump administration has vowed to sign such a bill into law has proven to be a very triggering turn of events.

Now, users in Donald Trump’s online safe spaces are cycling through all seven stages of grief.

But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, a scam artist who bilked hundreds of people by creating a fraudulent university atop a charter of “trust me, I got this.” Is it any wonder, then, that some Trump supporters still assume the president knows what he’s doing, even when all the evidence suggests otherwise?

These folks wanted "deregulation" and that's what they are getting.  Sometimes one needs to be careful what they wish for.  Before it's over, these folks may realize they brought a nightmare on themselves. 

GOP/Conservative Groups Plan US-wide Assault on Education, Health and Public Sector

David Koch

The hypocrisy of Republicans and self-professed Bible worshiping conservatives continues to soar to new levels.  As The Guardian reports, plans are underway for a 34 state campaign to "release residents from government dependency," which of course, really means that the poor and those without health care will be cast into the gutter to hopefully die while education spending is gutted.  Helping to fund this effort to bring back the worse aspects of the Gilded Age are not surprisingly the greed driven billionaire Koch brothers.   Shockingly, another major supporter is food giant Kraft and multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline (yes, the boyfriend and I will be changing our shopping patterns).  The article also highlights the pressing need to halt the political activities of alleged charities that are nothing more than funding funnels Here are story highlights:for the far right. 

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market thinktanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. . . . The documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014.

In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN's summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities.

Most of the "thinktanks" involved in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents propose the launch of "media campaigns" aimed at changing state laws and policies, or refer to "advancing model legislation" and "candidate briefings", in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.

The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.

The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:

• "reforms" to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;
• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;
• an education voucher system to promote private and home schooling in Florida;
• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;
• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.

Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely by rightwing foundations and corporations including the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, tobacco company Altria and the telecoms giant Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the document and points out that in its request for $40,000 from Searle, TPPF claims credit for blocking Medicaid expansion in the state.

The article is lengthy, so read the entire piece.

The Backlash Against the NSA's Spying on Americans

Reactions to the news that the National Security Agency ("NSA") has been spying on millions of Americans are all across the board.  Some are cheering the agency's aggressiveness in "weeding out terrorists" and "stopping terrorist attacks."  Others in contrast are highly upset now that they know that literally nothing may be private in their lives.  The defense for the spying is that it uses "meta analysis" and that our personal e-mails are not being read and our phone calls are not being monitored.  But is this actually true?  Less than three months ago, government officials denied that they were doing what we now in fact know they were doing.  The questions thus become (i) who do we trust and (ii) what could happen if the wrong individuals misuse information.  I for one, do not have a high level of trust of government when it comes to this type of information.  Perhaps I's a product of my youth in the 1960's and early 1070's when the U.S. government routinely lied about Vietnam.  Here are highlights from a column in the Washington Post that looks at the issue:

Keep your distance: The director of national intelligence is having intestinal distress.
“For me, it is literally — not figuratively, literally — gut-wrenching to see this happen,” James Clapper told Andrea Mitchell over the weekend, referring to leaks about the government’s secret program to collect vast troves of phone and Internet data.

There might be a bit more sympathy for Clapper’s digestive difficulty if he hadn’t delivered a kick in the gut to the American public just three months ago.  Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper at a Senate hearing in March, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”  “No, sir,” Clapper testified.

“It does not?” Wyden pressed. “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

We now know that Clapper was not telling the truth. The National Security Agency is quite wittingly collecting phone records of millions of Americans, and much more.

[Government] officials have only themselves to blame. It is precisely their effort to hide such a vast and consequential program from the American public that caused this pressure valve to burst. Instead of allowing a democratic debate about the programs in broad terms that would not have compromised national security, their attempts to keep the public in the dark have created a backlash in which the risks to national security can’t be controlled.

Edward Snowden, the leaker, did the honorable thing in revealing his identity; it would be more honorable if he would turn himself in and face the consequences for his law-breaking. But there is little honor in the way administration officials and lawmakers have avoided responsibility. Obama administration officials are blaming Snowden, while some lawmakers complain disingenuously that the administration kept them out of the loop.

All 535 members of Congress had authorization to learn all about the programs. Senators even received a written invitation in 2011 to view a classified report. Likewise, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), a former chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said Monday that members “could have gotten a briefing whenever they wanted to.” But apparently few bothered. Worse, lawmakers quashed efforts to allow even modest public disclosure of the broad contours of the program.  

“The pervasive secrecy on this topic created an information vacuum. If congressional oversight was not going to fill it in, it turned out leaks would. That’s not the optimal solution.”

Not optimal, but probably inevitable. Officials who denied the public a responsible debate on surveillance will now have a debate on Snowden’s terms — and there’s no use in bellyaching about it.

Spying on Americans: NSA Asked Verizon for All Call Data

Click image to enlarge

Some have scoffed at the reality that in the United States personal privacy is a thing of the past.  While we face ridiculous lengths to access financial and healthcare records, the government is spying on our every move.  The map above is from a January, 2008 post shows that spying on citizens in America ranks up there with levels in China and Russia - that's right, this is from BEFORE Barack Obama was elected for those in the GOP base - and things have not improved over the intervening years as evidenced by a new story in the Washington Post about the NSA - National Security Administration - accessing all of Verizon's call records.  That's right, all of them, not just those of suspected would be terrorists.  Think you are having a private phone conversation?  Think again.   Here are highlights from the Post story (NOTE: it was a British paper that first broke the story):

The National Security Agency appears to be collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of American customers of Verizon, one of the nation’s largest phone companies, under a top-secret court order issued in April.

The order appears to require a Verizon subsidiary to provide the NSA with daily information on all telephone calls by its customers within the United States and from foreign locations into the United States.

The order, which was signed by a judge from the secret court that oversees domestic surveillance, was first reported on the Web site of the Guardian newspaper. The Web site reproduced a copy of the order, which two former U.S. officials told The Washington Post appears to be authentic.

If the document is genuine, it could represent the broadest surveillance order known to have been issued. It also would confirm long-standing suspicions of civil liberties advocates about the sweeping nature of U.S. surveillance through commercial carriers under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

An expert in this aspect of the law said Wednesday night that the order appears to be a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006. The expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said that the order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency.

The order falls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which authorizes the government to make broad demands on telephone carriers for information about calls. In this case, the order requires Verizon to provide “ongoing, daily” information about “all call detail records . . . created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad; or wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The White House, the Justice Department and the FBI, which apparently sought the order, declined to comment. Spokesmen for Verizon and the court also declined to comment.

But civil liberties groups were quick to criticize the sweeping nature of the order.  “This is a truly stunning revelation,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “This suggests that the government has been compiling a comprehensive record of Americans’ associations and possibly even their whereabouts.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has sued the government over its surveillance prac­tices, said in a statement Wednesday night that the order “requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon subscribers anywhere in the U.S. It also contains a gag order prohibiting Verizon from disclosing information about the order to anyone other than their counsel.”

The order also seems to confirm fears expressed by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.). In a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. last year, they said, “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of . . . these secret court opinions. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.”

Government officials have defended the broad surveillance powers, saying that the information has been vital in uncovering and disrupting terrorist plots. They also say that the surveillance has operated under the provisions of the Patriot Act and other laws.

There's more, but the bottom line is that America is increasingly a police state and the trend began under Bush/Cheney and the then GOP controlled Congress.  This may shock the conspiracy crowd in the GOP, but it was their guys who put this system into motion.  I find it frightening.