International Human Rights Group: NSA Surveillance Undermining US Democracy

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Photo Credit: WNDBy F. Michael Maloof. The National Security Agency, probably the most secretive of the U.S. intelligence branches, has very limited congressional oversight, and those privileged few – generally the chairmen of the respective intelligence committees in the House and Senate – cannot divulge information to other members.

Supporters say it’s needed for national security.

But a human rights organization is warning that such “national security” efforts may, in fact, be undermining the democracy on which America was built, or worse.

“A system of secret surveillance for the protection of national security many undermine or even destroy democracy, under the cloak of defending it,” warns the European Court of Human Rights, a part of the European Union’s European Council.

The issue of secret spying on Americans has been flooding the headlines since whistleblower Edward Snowden grabbed as many classified surveillance secrets from the government as he could, then took off on a globe-trotting trip and started spilling secrets about the tentacles Washington is using to spy on individual Americans. Read more from this story HERE.

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Government tapping into underseas cables for surveillance?

By Fox News. Not only is the U.S. government gathering information from tech companies on global Internet traffic — according to new reports, the NSA is also siphoning off data from underseas cables that criss-cross the world.

The Washington Post on Wednesday published a classified NSA slide that provided side-by-side guidance on the two surveillance programs.

“You Should Use Both,” the slide said, in an apparent message to NSA personnel. Read more from this story HERE.

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The NSA slide you haven’t seen

Photo Credit: Washington Post

By Craig Timberg. Recent debate over U.S. government surveillance has focused on the information that American technology companies secretly provide to the National Security Agency. But that is only one of the ways the NSA eavesdrops on international communications.

A classified NSA slide obtained by The Washington Post lists “Two Types of Collection.”

One is PRISM, the NSA program that collects information from technology companies, which was first revealed in reports by the Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper last month…

The slide also shows a crude map of the undersea cable network that carries data from either side of North America on to the rest of the world. As a story in Sunday’s Post made clear, these undersea cables are essential to worldwide data flows and to the surveillance capabilities of the U.S. government and its allies…

Both slides have circles attached to arrows suggesting possible collection points, but they cover areas too broad to discern where NSA accesses fiber-optic cable networks. The slides also list code names under the Upstream program. Read more from this story HERE.

Murkowski Votes With Democrats to Advance Bill Forcing Private Employers in 33 States to Hire Homosexual Applicants (ENDA)

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By Daniel Strauss. A Senate panel approved legislation Wednesday in a bipartisan 15-7 vote that would outlaw discrimination in the workplace based on an employee’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

Three Republicans joined 12 Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in approving the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).

The GOP votes came from Sens. Orrin Hatch (Utah), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and Mark Kirk (Ill.). Hatch voted aye by proxy.

The legislation would outlaw any kind of discrimination based on sexual orientation including both hiring and firing and other employment related matters like salaries and terms of employment.

Federal law currently outlaws employment discrimination centered on age, disability, national origin, race, religion or sex but not gender identity or sexual orientation. ENDA aims to fill the hole in states in the 33 states where there is no separate law against discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Read more from this story HERE.

[Editor’s note: Murkowski reported to the pro-homosexual publication Metro Weekly that “When I was home over the break, I think it was 1,174 postcards were delivered to my office from Alaskans from around the state in support of ENDA. If you listen to your folks back home this is important to them.”]
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The Alaska Family Council Recommends You Watch this Documentary on the Left’s International LGBT Agenda

A new documentary entitled Cultural Imperialism examines the Obama Administration’s efforts to impose its LGBT values on many third world countries, particularly African nations. And they are pushing back:

Army Vet Discovers Feds Now Digging Up Decades Old Minor Convictions to Prevent Gun Ownership

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A local Army veteran is fighting for permission to own a gun after a misdemeanor pot conviction from 1971 stopped him from buying .22 caliber rifle.

Ron Kelly, who retired from the Army in 1993, after a career of firing tanks, machine guns and an array of other weapons [shooting an estimated 100,000 rounds through the course of his career], was recently turned away at the Wal-Mart in Tomball after a computerized background check turned up the arrest.

Today’s Houston Chronicle has a front page story on Ron Kellly and his fight to own a gun.

Kelly said he’d forgotten all about the incident, in which he was arrested over a baggie of pot while in high school, and given one year of probation.

He was a bit embarrassed. Now he’s outraged…

According to the FBI, which runs the background checks known as the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the law states that a person can be prevented from owing a gun if they are convicted of a misdemeanor in which they could spend more than two years behind bars.

Read more from this story HERE.

Police: Marine Corps Veteran Stops Carjacker Holding Knife to Girl’s Throat (+video)

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Photo Credit: WFTVBy WFTV. Police said a carjacker who tried to steal four cars was captured Tuesday.

Detectives said Eliud Montalvo attempted several carjackings that were all within a block of one another at the corner of Conway and Curry Ford roads.

Officials said a retired Marine Corps veteran, Andrew Koplin, stopped the carjacker with his concealed weapon.

The first incident involved an 80-year-old woman in a parking lot. The other attempted carjackings happened within a block of the first one.

The last two were stopped by Koplin, who said he noticed Montalvo pulling a knife in a Publix parking lot.

Read more from this story HERE.

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More on the Attempted Carjackings from the Orlando Sentinel

By Jerriann Sullivan. Several Good Samaritans, including one with a gun, joined police in chasing down an Orlando man after he allegedly tried to carjack four different drivers at knifepoint Monday morning.

Eliud Martir Montalvo’s rampage started at 9:30 a.m. when he ran toward 80-year-old Joan Shedd and grabbed for her car keys in the Publix parking lot at 4402 Curry Ford Road, an Orlando Police Department arrest report said.

Shedd didn’t give up her keys, so 54-year-old Montalvo kicked her rear end, knocking her on the ground, police said.

A witness told police the Orlando man kept kicking the elderly woman before a man chased him away.

Montalvo ran from Shedd’s vehicle to Connie Sue Gooley’s truck and tried to carjack it, the report said. Read more from this story HERE.

Taxpayer-Funded Research Lets People Experience What it Feels Like to be a Cow

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerWould experiencing a day in the life of a cow make you less likely to eat meat? How would chopping down a tree affect your paper usage? These are questions that the National Science Foundation awarded universities $748,000 dollars to use virtual reality to answer.

“If somebody becomes an animal, do they gain empathy for that animal and think about its plight?” asked Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “In this case, empathy toward the animal also coincides with an environmental benefit, which is that [not eating] animals consumes less energy.”

Bailenson is heading research at Stanford in which participants don virtual reality helmets and walk on their hands and feet. They are then able to see themselves as a cow in a virtual mirror. They experience what a cow does on its way to being slaughtered and then record what they eat for the next week to see if being a cow reduced meat consumption.

This is just one experiment Bailenson is conducting, but all his experiments are tailored to finding new ways to encourage environmental conservation.

E&E News reports: “Volunteers also have virtually chopped down a tree, a study aimed at examining attitudes toward paper use. Others took a virtual reality shower while eating lumps of coal — literally consuming it — to gain insight into how much was needed to heat the water.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Shocking Video of Van Striking Woman, Then Dragging Stroller With Baby in it, Released by Police in Effort to Find Assailant

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Photo Credit: Muskegon Police DepartmentPolice are hoping a shocking video snippet showing a van backing into a Muskegon woman pushing a baby stroller, then dragging the stroller for a short distance with a 1-year-old child still in it, stirs up enough outrage from viewers that someone will come forward and identify the driver of the van.

The incident occurred around 10:30 a.m. on June 25 in the parking lot of Sam’s Drink All, 1500 S. Getty St., in Muskegon.

That man, who appears on surveillance video inside the business, drove off after striking the shaken mother and the baby stroller.

Police said the mother and the child were remarkably unscathed in the incident that was also captured on the business’ outdoor video surveillance camera.

As of late Tuesday afternoon, July 9, the man had not yet been identified.

Read more from this story HERE.

California Senate Passes Bill to Allow Non-Citizen Poll Workers to Help Non-English-Speaking Citizens to Vote

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe state Senate on Monday approved legislation that would allow immigrants who are not U.S. citizens to assist voters casting a ballot.

The measure from Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, would allow for up to five non-citizens to serve at a particular polling site. Those poll workers must be permanent U.S. residents who legally entered the country.

Those residents could provide much-needed help to voters with limited English skills, said Sen. Norma Torres, D-Pomona, who presented Bonta’s bill. There are 2.6 million eligible California voters who are not fully proficient in English, she said.

“These individuals have the absolute right to make fully informed voting decisions on Election Day,” Torres said.

More than three dozen organizations involved in elections and immigrant advocacy have signaled their support for AB817.

Read more from this story HERE.

Customers Catch, Tie Up Escaped Rapist Who Then Pleads to Just “Go Back to Prison” (+video)

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The owner of the Olivesburg General Store said employees had posted an escaped Mansfield Correctional Institution inmate’s photograph on the counter next to the cash register Thursday.

That idea came in handy.

Hours later, a customer tackled the inmate to the floor as he was paying for items, including a candy bar, with change. The incident was captured on video.

“He didn’t even realize until he was on the ground what was going on. He kept saying, ‘I’m not going to run. You’ve got me,’” owner Connie Crossen said. “They didn’t want to take chances, so they tied him up. When they were taking him out he told one of our employees, ‘I just want this over. I just want to go back to prison.’”

“When he first walked up they all knew,” she said. “Even the customers who came in, everybody was doing second looks at him.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Florida Police Department’s Officers, Captain “Morally Bankrupt,” Engaged in Deplorable Sex Acts (+video)

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Authorities are investigating a widespread sex scandal involving nearly a dozen police officers in one Florida city after a civilian crime analyst detailed trysts with the men in police and fire stations, patrol cars, motels and even in a parking lot after a memorial service for a slain officer.

Sue Eberle, 37, has told officials that she had consensual and sometimes coerced sex with the officers and a firefighter, and that she once was propositioned by a city worker in Lakeland. Eberle’s accounts of the liaisons were largely corroborated by her sexual partners and others within the police department, and published in a graphic, 59-page report written in an incredulous tone by the county’s top prosecutor. It said the department’s problems investigating crimes might be caused by some high-ranking officers being more interested in having sex with Eberle than doing their jobs.

“The investigation revealed an extraordinary amount of sexual conduct that was committed both on-duty and off-duty,” wrote Jerry Hill, Polk County’s state attorney, in the report dated June 25. “We find the conduct of a number of sworn officers, including some officers of rank, to be at best a waste of taxpayer dollars. At worst their actions indicate a moral bankruptcy that exists amongst some individuals within the ranks at the Lakeland Police Department.”

Eberle, who has retained an attorney, recounted for Hill how she had sex in police cars, cemeteries and motels with different officers – and in the parking lot outside a reception that followed the December 2011 funeral of Officer Arnulfo Crispin, who had been fatally shot on duty. She also said officers and some supervisors pressured her for sex, groped her while working and texted her photos of their genitalia.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video:

Here’s another video of the Lakeland Police Department involved in an illegal and demeaning “bra search” of an innocent driver last month:

Libyan Official Ties Egypt’s Morsi to Benghazi Attack

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Jerome R. Corsi. A letter by a top Libyan official blames the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens on Mohamed Morsi, the now deposed president of Egypt.

WND has verified the authenticity of the letter by Col. Mahmoud al-Sharif, the chief of the Department of Security of the Libyan government in Tripoli, written four days after the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi.

The letter mentions Morsi as being implicated in the planning that led to the Benghazi attack and identifies the Egyptian jihadist group Ansar Sharia as the group responsible.

The letter discloses that the bodies of three Americans killed in the attack along with Ambassador Stevens were desecrated in revenge for the production of an anti-Islam film, assumed to be “Innocence of the Muslims.” The film was produced by the imprisoned Mark Basseley Yousef, the person the Obama administration erroneously claimed was responsible for triggering for attack itself.

White House press secretary Jay Carney confirmed Wednesday the Obama administration has no change in plans to deliver F-16s to the Egyptian military. The U.S. most likely will deliver four F-16s in August, with another eight slated for December. The deliveries are part of the continuing U.S. $1.5 billion in aid scheduled to be dispersed to Egypt in the current fiscal year, despite the military coup that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Morsi. Read more from this story HERE.

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Egypt Orders Arrest of Brotherhood Leaders

By Thomson/Reuters. Egypt’s public prosecutor ordered the arrest on Wednesday of the leaders of ousted President Mohamed Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood, charging them with inciting violence in a clash that saw troops shoot dozens of his supporters dead.

A week after the army toppled Egypt’s first democratically elected leader, bloodshed has opened deep fissures in the Arab world’s most populous country, with bitterness at levels unseen in its modern history.

Brotherhood spokesman Gehad El-Haddad said the announcement of charges against leader Mohamed Badie and several other senior Islamists was a bid by authorities to break up a vigil by thousands of Mursi supporters demanding his reinstatement.

This week’s unrest has alarmed Western donors and Israel, which has a 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. Washington, treading a careful line, has neither welcomed Mursi’s removal nor denounced it as a “coup”. Under U.S. law, a coup would require it to halt aid, including the $1.3 billion it gives the army each year.

The Brotherhood’s downfall has, however, been warmly welcomed by three of the rich Arab monarchies of the Gulf, who showered Cairo with aid to prop up the collapsing economy. Read more from this story HERE.