The Glade 4.0

Everything of importance is this country is no more than 10 turns from I-75.

Everything of importance is this country is no more than 10 turns from I-75.

So, for the 4th post in a row you've taken two random numbers without trying to grok the intervening explanations and just done basic division and said, "Welp, Khross is wrong."

Thanks for demonstrating why Shuyung said I was wasting time in his first response.

Their houses are generally 10x salary initial purchase because of stupid politics.

That's kinda how our freeway system works. You could say the same thing about I-5, I-10 or I-15. :p

I mean, I could probably get to I-75 with like 2 "turns". I-15 to I-40. I-40 to I-75.

Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform
By David Kravets
05.10.13
6:30 AM


The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.

This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.

“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”

For now, the legislation allows the database to be used solely for employment purposes. But historically such limitations don’t last. The Social Security card, for example, was created to track your government retirement benefits. Now you need it to purchase health insurance.

“The Social Security number itself, it’s pretty ubiquitous in your life,” Calabrese said.

David Bier, an analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, agrees with the ACLU’s fears.

“The most worrying aspect is that this creates a principle of permission basically to do certain activities and it can be used to restrict activities,” he said. “It’s like a national ID system without the card.”

For the moment, the debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee is focused on the parameters of legalization for unauthorized immigrants, a border fence and legal immigration in the future.

The committee is scheduled to resume debate on the package Tuesday.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

IRS apologizes for targeting conservative groups

The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

"That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases for further review," Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

"The IRS would like to apologize for that," she added.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

Apologize by firing.

I meant job termination but I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Report: Top IRS officials knew in 2011 that conservative groups were targeted
By Josh Hicks and Ed O’Keefe,

An inspector general’s report due for release this week says senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew that agents were targeting conservative groups for special scrutiny as early as 2011, nine months before the IRS commissioner assured Congress the targeting was not happening.

The report is certain to raise questions about the timing of the IRS’s disclosure of the targeting on Friday, how high up were the officials who knew about the practice, and whether anyone outside the agency was aware of it.

Details of the inspector general’s audit, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, revealed that Lois G. Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS and made the disclosure Friday, knew about the targeting of tea party and other groups in June 2011. In March 2012, IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman told Congress that the agency was not targeting conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups

IRS Inquisition Update
By Kevin Williamson

Along with targeting tea-party groups, the IRS may also have given extra-special attention to the tax-exempt status of some Jewish groups for political reasons.

From the Jewish Press:

The passionately pro-Israel organization Z STREET filed a lawsuit against the IRS, claiming it had been told by an IRS agent that because the organization was "connected to Israel"; its application for tax-exempt status would receive additional scrutiny. This admission was made in response to a query about the lengthy reveiw of Z STREET's tax exempt status application.

In addition, the IRS agent told a Z STREET representative that the applications of some of those Israel-related organizations have been assigned to "a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the Administration's public policies."

And at least one purely religious Jewish organization, one not focused on Israel, was the recipient of bizarre and highly inappropriate questions about Israel. Those questions also came from the same non-profit division of the IRS at issue for inappropriately targeting politically conservative groups. The IRS required that Jewish organization to state "whether [it] supports the existence of the land of Israel" and also demanded the organization "describe [its] religious belief system toward the land of Israel."

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

So the IRS just admitted it went on a political hunt against the Tea party? Bet no job will be lost over that one.

Regarding the IRS thing, given that political activity by 501(c)(4) organizations is supposed to be limited (i.e. to qualify for 501(c)(4) status, groups have to be primarily focused on "social welfare" not electioneering), if the IRS had instead decided to take a closer look at any group with a political sounding name that applied for 501(c)(4) status, do you guys think that'd be ok?

Full disclosure: I think the IRS folks who were doing this actually might have said something about targeting groups with political sounding names, but their focus was apparently on conservative groups, so I'm not offering this alternative as a gotcha. I'm just wondering - if the IRS really did use a non-partisan, "if it sounds political, we're going to take a closer look" approach to enforcement, would you be ok with that?

Justice Department Complies With FOIA By Releasing Completely Redacted Document

By Alisa Wiersema

May 10, 2013 5:14pm


The Justice Department responded to an ACLU request with a heavily redacted document. Credit: ACLU

Yes, the Department of Justice complied with the letter of the law and responded to a Freedom of Information Act request from the ACLU seeking insight into the Obama Administration’s policy on intercepting text messages from cell phones.

But no, it didn’t release any actual information. Or even any words or letters. As one Reddit comment put it, “[the document is] so transparent it’s completely invisible.”

Instead, the Justice Department released 15 pages that were entirely redacted – shaded over in heavy black from top to bottom.

All that was visible is the subject of the memo: “Guidance for the Minimization of Text Messages over Dual-Function Cellular Telephones”

It is all part of a larger legal battle between civil rights activists and the federal law enforcement about electronic communications. The ACLU has argued that current government surveillance practices on electronic communications violate citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights, which are meant to protect Americans from unlawful searches and seizures. With the FOIA request they were trying to determine if the FBI had properly complied with a 2010 appeals court decision that concerned when email providers must turn over messages to law enforcement and whether the guidelines apply to text messages.

View the full FOIA response here.

“The documents show that despite a federal appeals court ruling that under the Fourth Amendment, investigators must get a warrant before reading people’s emails, the FBI has apparently not been getting warrants to do so, and the policy of U.S. Attorneys’ offices appears to vary by location,” ACLU spokesperson, Josh Bell told ABC News in an email.

ACLU attorney Nathan Wessler further explained their position in a recent blog post.

The documents provided to the ACLU regarding FBI policies, he wrote, do not outwardly state whether or not government agents are required to get warrants to access all electronic communications. According to the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, agents are only required to have warrants for electronic communications that have been unopened and are less than 180 days old, suggesting that older or opened communications could be fair game and prompting ACLU’s FOIA request.

“We got very little information about the policy on text messages,” Bell said regarding the FOIA request. “[The document] does not even show the date, let alone what the policy is.”

In April, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which will aim to close the warrant loopholes currently affecting online communication policies.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/13/us/justice-ap-phones/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

And Justice has been going for the AP phone's records.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin