"Conspiracy Theorists Are Crazy..."

Schneier on Security: The Continuing Public/Private Surveillance Partnership: 

"Yes, it may seem like the the public/private surveillance partnership has frayed -- but, unfortunately, it is alive and well. The main focus of massive Internet companies and government agencies both still largely align: to keep us all under constant surveillance. When they bicker, it's mostly role-playing designed to keep us blasé about what's really going on.

The U.S. intelligence community is still playing word games with us. The NSA collects our data based on four different legal authorities: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, Executive Order 12333 of 1981 and modified in 2004 and 2008, Section 215 of the Patriot Act of 2001, and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008. Be careful when someone from the intelligence community uses the caveat "not under this program" or "not under this authority"; almost certainly it means that whatever it is they're denying is done under some other program or authority...

Google's recent actions, and similar actions of many Internet companies, will definitely improve its users' security against surreptitious government collection programs -- both the NSA's and other governments' -- but their assurances deliberately ignores the massive security vulnerability built into its services by design. Google, and by extension, the U.S. government, still has access to your communications on Google's servers. Google could change that. It could encrypt your e-mail so only you could decrypt and read it. It could provide for secure voice and video so no one outside the conversations could eavesdrop. It doesn't. And neither does Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, or any of the others...

The biggest Internet companies don't offer real security because the U.S. government won't permit it. This isn't paranoia. We know that the U.S. government ordered the secure e-mail provider Lavabit to turn over its master keys and compromise every one of its users. We know that the U.S. government convinced Microsoft -- either through bribery, coercion, threat, or legal compulsion -- to make changes in how Skype operates, to make eavesdropping easier. We don't know what sort of pressure the U.S. government has put on Google and the others. We don't know what secret agreements those companies have reached with the NSA. We do know the NSA's BULLRUN program to subvert Internet cryptography was successful against many common protocols. Did the NSA demand Google's keys, as it did with Lavabit? Did its Tailored Access Operations group break into to Google's servers and steal the keys? We just don't know."

What the ungodly fuck?/Why people hate cops. Real American Hero AZ Cop Demolishes Unsuspecting Female Student During ‘Riot’ | Mediaite: 

"“These girls had been trying to get to their car. The girl is on her phone not paying attention and this cop came out of nowhere and just leveled her,” Landolt told the Daily Star. “After that everyone just started yelling and she started crying.” Watch below:"

James Lovelock: environmentalism has become a religion | Environment | The Guardian:
"Environmentalism has "become a religion" and does not pay enough attention to facts, according to James Lovelock. The 94 year-old scientist, famous for his Gaia hypothesis that Earth is a self-regulating, single organism, also said that he had been too certain about the rate of global warming in his past book, that "it’s just as silly to be a [climate] denier as it is to be a believer” and that fracking and nuclear power should power the UK, not renewable sources such as windfarms.

Speaking to the Guardian for an interview ahead of a landmark UN climate science report on Monday on the impacts of climate change, Lovelock said of the warnings of climate catastrophe in his 2006 book, Revenge of Gaia: "I was a little too certain in that book. You just can’t tell what’s going to happen." “It [the impact from climate change] could be terrible within a few years, though that’s very unlikely, or it could be hundreds of years before the climate becomes unbearable," he said. Lovelock's comments appear to be at odds with dire forecasts from a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday, which leaked versions show will warn that even small temperature rises will bring "abrupt and irreversible changes" to natural systems, including Arctic sea ice and coral reefs."

The drug war exception to the Fourth Amendment: 

"The drug war has eviscerated the Fourth Amendment. And because of asset forfeiture policies that allow police to seize cash and other valuable they find on motorists that they can even remotely suggest are connected to some sort of drug activity, usually with the proceeds going back to the police department, nowhere is this more apparent than in the reasons cops have given (and in many cases that courts have accepted) to justify traffic stops based on suspicions of drug activity...

Officer Klitch claimed to have smelled pot coming from Roseen’s truck. There was no pot. But at least Klitch waited until he had actually stopped Roseen to make that claim. In May 2012, Dominic Fornal, a deputy in Sarasota, Fla., claimed he could smell pot coming from the car traveling in front of him at 35 mph, even though that car’s windows were up. This wasn’t pot smoke. It was the pot itself. After four searches of the car by several deputies came up empty, Fornal turned off the lapel microphone from his dashboard camera and somehow managed to find a joint in the trunk that all the other cops and two drug dogs had missed. A spokesman for the sheriff’s department said Fornal ”operated entirely within department policy.”

Fornal isn’t alone. In 2012, a stop of two women in Irving, Tex., made national news. The women were stopped for allegedly tossing cigarette butts out a car window. But because the officer claimed to have smelled marijuana coming from the car, the women were subjected to a thorough search of their car, and then a humiliating roadside cavity search. There was no pot...

In Virginia, a judge recently upheld the stop and search of a car in which an officer claimed he could smell pot coming from a car he was following, even though the windows in the suspect’s car and the police car were rolled up, and even though a subsequent search turned up no pot.  Last October, another judge in the same state threw out a search in which an officer made a similar claim. "