Recently in Privacy Category

(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

On Wednesday, the Guardian published documents revealing the government has been collecting months’ worth of telephone “metadata” on millions of Verizon customers. The Washington Post and the Guardian followed with news that both the National Security Agency and the FBI have been pulling Americans’ data from major web companies like Facebook and Google.

Since 9/11, the government has been collecting enormous amounts of information on citizens. But most of the data grabbing is done in secret. What do we know about what the government knows? Here’s our reading guide to the government growing surveillance.

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts , New York Times, December 2005

In 2005, the New York Times broke the story of warrantless wiretapping under President George W. Bush. The National Security Agency previously listened in on calls in which both parties were abroad, but monitoring expanded under Bush to include U.S. calls and emails made to overseas contacts. Officials said it was an attempt to track “dirty numbers” that were linked to al Qaida.

Gaia Health

March 21, 2013

Government intrusion into our lives keeps growing. Leslie Manookian notes the rise of state programs of vaccine registration, which seem to coincide with increases in people taking vaccination exemptions. Is this a coincidence, or is there a more sinister motive?

Dusty Registry, by Mackenzie Cowell (cropped)

by Leslie Manookian

In recent years, vaccine exemption laws have been under attack in a variety of states while vaccine registries have been on the rise. Vaccine exemptions have been restricted in California, Washington, and Vermont and attempts to restrict them have been seen in other states like Colorado, Texas, Oregon, and New Mexico. Over the same period, legislation has been introduced in many of these states to extend vaccine registries from only children to everyone in a state, or to make it more difficult to stay out of the registry if so desired.

If you had to guess - what would you say is one of the worst things you could do to a developing fetus? Smoking cigarettes? Drinking alcohol? Heavy lifting? Falling down a flight of stairs? Sure - these are all dangerous things to do while pregnant, but another thing that you may not have considered that is actually dangerous to a developing child - ultrasounds!

What do ultrasounds do? Boiled down, they do little more than inform parents about their child’s development and rarely lead to any meaningful action. The only time an ultrasound is actually required is when safety of the child (or mother) is clearly in question and when the results of the test would require action.

Studies published in medical journals Lancet and the Canadian Medical Association Journal show that an ultrasound may affect fetal growth, resulting in babies with lower birth weight. In addition, children are twice as likely to have delayed speech development if they were examined via ultrasound as a fetus.

Story at-a-glance

Two years ago, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a lawsuit to suspend the deployment of body scanners at US airports, pending an independent review. On July 15, 2011, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the TSA had violated the Administrative Procedures Act by implementing body scanners as a primary screening method without first undertaking public notice and comment rulemaking. The Court ordered the agency to "promptly" undertake the proper rulemaking procedures

The TSA has so far defied the court’s order. On July 17, 2012, EPIC again asked the D.C. Circuit court of appeals to compel the agency to comply with the law, and the court has now demanded the TSA respond by August 30

Both houses of Congress filed bills this year demanding that the TSA and DHS produce proof of their safety claims with an independent laboratory study

At the end of last year, the EU banned all scanning that expose the public to ionizing radiation, even if the exposure is miniscule

No verifiable, independent scientific testing of the safety of the backscatter scanners has been made, and some scientists believe the high quality images produced cannot possibly be obtained with the low levels of radiation described, and that the actual level may be 45 times higher than what the manufacture is claiming

The New York Times recently shed light on "a wide-ranging surveillance operation by the FDA against a group of its own scientists". Indeed the scientists correspondence included "secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama."

Why the FDA surveillance?

The 5 scientists had raised concerns" that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation".

"A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists' medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed "a substantial and specific danger to public safety."

Daily Mail

8th February 8, 2012

Girls as young as 13 are being given contraceptive implants at school without their parents’ knowledge.

Nurses insert devices into their arms which temporarily prevent pregnancy by releasing hormones into the blood.

Last year 1,700 girls aged 13 and 14 were fitted with implants, while 800 had injections which have the same effect.

The 2010/11 NHS figures also show that 3,200 15-year-old girls were fitted with implants, and 1,700 had injections.

With all the buzz surrounding the specter of cataclysmic change that may soon be upon us as the Mayan calendar comes to an end in December, it's a good time to take stock of life here on planet Earth. While doomsday predictions will no doubt garner much of the attention from the mainstream media, I don't plan on building a fallout shelter or taking any other extreme precautions for that matter. Nevertheless, there are big changes coming and I do believe that it is possible to discern the outlines of a new cultural paradigm that has been slowly taking shape for quite some time. What it holds in store for medicine should be of interest to us all.

On a global scale, signs of the shift are already evident. In just a short span of time we have witnessed floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, melting polar ice caps, the Fukushima disaster, and dramatic changes in weather patterns. In socioeconomic and geopolitical terms, we have seen the fall of the Twin Towers, the Wall Street financial meltdown, the burst of the housing bubble, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the European monetary crisis, and an ever-widening income gap between the haves and have-nots.

Janet Napolitano’s promise that Americans won’t be forced to remove their shoes comes at a price

Janet Napolitano’s promise that travelers will soon not be required to take their shoes off at airport security checkpoints comes at a cost – new MRI-style scanners that will zap Americans with a powerful magnetic field that has been linked with numerous health risks.

“Safran Morpho, a firm that was formerly a part of General Electric’s Security division, told POLITICO that their model could be mass produced in a matter of months and that a prototype was already ready.”

“Morpho’s device would scan shoes in three ways: using technology similar to MRIs used in medical settings; explosives trace scanners; and traditional magnetometer metal detection,” according to the Politico report.

However, the new technology is set to be unveiled with barely a whimper of public discussion about the potential health concerns associated with MRI scanning technology, which is normally only used in highly controlled medical settings, and the sanity of allowing such sensitive technology to be operated in busy airports by low-paid TSA security goons.

July 7, 2011 by Infowars Ireland

EU resolution allows widespread use of technology, with conditions

The European Union Parliament has adopted a resolution to allow the full use of body scanners in airports of the 27 European member nations.

A majority of MEPs expressed support in a show of raised hands ahead of a scheduled decision this week by the autonomous European Commission whether to authorize the use of scanners at airports. The Parliament will then have three months to overturn the decision.

UK airports, as well as airports in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Finland have been using the scanners in trials since last year. Currently in the UK, anyone who refuses to walk through the scanner if asked to do so is automatically refused permission to fly.

December 9, 2010 by Infowars Ireland

(NaturalNews) Airports have become a minefield of health hazards, and an investigation into airport safety has revealed that radiation emitted from various scanning machines is sometimes much higher than intended, putting workers and passengers at serious risk. And while the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) insists that the machines are safe, the agency refuses to release the actual safety inspection reports to back its claim.