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Mystery Donor Posts Bail for Texas Teen Jailed for Allegations of Terrorist Threats on Facebook

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Photo Credit: FOX SAN ANTONIOThe Texas teen who has been in jail since April for making alleged terror threats on Facebook was released on bail after an anonymous donor posted his bond.

Justin Carter, 19, was released Thursday according to officials for the Comal County Jail near San Antonio. He was jailed on a terrorist threat charge for writing on the social media site that he was going to “shoot up a kindergarten” while playing an online computer game.

He later said in a letter to a judge from jail that what he wrote was “terrible, mean and downright stupid” but “the misunderstanding was that I wasn’t trying to scare anyone, I was trying to be witty and sarcastic. I failed and I was arrested.”

“This (release) came as a huge shock to his family,” Carter’s attorney, Donald Flanary told FoxNews.com. “They couldn’t make the bond. They were surprised that one person would be willing to donate the money.”

The attorney declined to discuss the identity of the donor other than saying that the large sum was from one person who is a U.S. citizen.

Read more from this story HERE.

Facebook Usage May be Able to Predict Risk of Suicide

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Photo Credit: Shutterstock If you’ve been thinking about killing yourself, your social media might give you away. An initiative called the Durkheim Project will use artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to identify common words and phrases among those who might be contemplating suicide.

The program, which launched on July 2, currently targets only veterans, who have disproportionately high suicide rates. Veterans opt into the Durkheim Project, which installs an app on computers, iOS and Android devices. These apps keep track of what users post and upload it to a medical database. A medical AI monitors the data in real-time, picking out patterns that might lead to self-harm.

The Durkheim Project app monitors content from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, in addition to storing information from a user’s mobile device. A database at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth University will keep track of users’ locations and text messages, and will not share any information with third parties. Additionally, the system will be guarded by a firewall to ward off would-be hackers.

“The study we’ve begun with our research partners will build a rich knowledge base that eventually could enable timely interventions by mental health professionals,” said Chris Poulin, principal investigator on the project, in a statement. “Facebook’s capability for outreach is unparalleled.”

Read more from this story HERE.

State Department Bureau Spent $630,000 on Facebook ‘Likes’

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Photo Credit: Thinkstock Image

Photo Credit: Thinkstock Image

State Department officials spent $630,000 to get more Facebook “likes,” prompting employees to complain to a government watchdog that the bureau was “buying fans” in social media, the agency’s inspector general says.

The department’s Bureau of International Information Programs spent the money to increase its “likes” count between 2011 and March 2013.

“Many in the bureau criticize the advertising campaigns as ‘buying fans’ who may have once clicked on an ad or ‘liked’ a photo but have no real interest in the topic and have never engaged further,” the inspector general reported.

The spending increased the bureau’s English-language Facebook page likes from 100,000 to more than 2 million and to 450,000 on Facebook’s foreign-language pages.

Despite the surge in likes, the IG said the effort failed to reach the bureau’s target audience, which is largely older and more influential than the people liking its pages. Only about 2 percent of fans actually engage with the pages by liking, sharing or commenting.

Read more from this story HERE.

Facebook Admits ‘Mistake’ in Blocking Conservative Fox News Radio Commentator

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Anyone familiar with the work of Fox News Radio’s Todd Starnes would recognize the inspiration behind the thoughts that he recently posted on Facebook. They’re steeped in the events of recent weeks and express contempt for certain currents of opinion:

“I’m about as politically incorrect as you can get. I’m wearing an NRA ball cap, eating a Chick-fil-A sandwich, reading a Paula Deen cookbook and sipping a 20-ounce sweet tea while sitting in my Cracker Barrel rocking chair with the Gather Vocal Band singing ‘Jesus Saves’ on the stereo and a Gideon’s Bible in my pocket. Yes sir, I’m politically incorrect and happy as a June bug.”

According to Fox News Insider, that message got Starnes banned from Facebook. The site sent him this message: “We removed this from Facebook because it violates our Community Standards. So you’re temporarily blocked from using this feature.” A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the blocking.

Those “Community Standards” are found right here. They outline 10 no-no areas for Facebook users: violence and threats, self-harm, bullying and harassment, hate speech, graphic content, nudity and pornography, identity and privacy, intellectual property, phishing and spam and security.

Read more from this story HERE.

New Surveillance Disclosure: Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Went to Work for NSA in 2010

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Photo Credit: C-Span

Photo Credit: C-Span

When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.

Mr. Kelly’s move to the spy agency, which has not previously been reported, underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans.

The only difference is that the N.S.A. does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.

The disclosure of the spy agency’s program called Prism, which is said to collect the e-mails and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, has prompted the companies to deny that the agency has direct access to their computers, even as they acknowledge complying with secret N.S.A. court orders for specific data.

Yet technology experts and former intelligence officials say the convergence between Silicon Valley and the N.S.A. and the rise of data mining — both as an industry and as a crucial intelligence tool — have created a more complex reality.

Read more from this story HERE.

Facebook Removes Pic of Syrian Rebel Smiling with Beheaded Christian

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Facebook stumbled into the heated debate over Syrian intervention after it removed a graphic photo depicting a Syrian rebel holding the decapitated head of a Christian man over a grill. The social network suggests the image, which received more than 30,000 views and was shared 1,700 times, was removed for its disturbing content, but activists accuse Facebook of silencing opponents of involvement in the Syrian slaughter.

The Daily Mail originally reported on the atrocity in December 2012. The victim, Andrei Arbashe, 38, was beheaded by Islamic extremists after his brother had allegedly complained that the Syrian rebels were “behaving like bandits.”

The publication wrote that Arbashe’s “headless corpse was found by the side of the road, surrounded by hungry dogs.” The Daily Mail story does not contain the graphic photo, but the National Liberty Federation (NLF), a liberty-oriented non-profit organization, posted the image on its Facebook page. The NLF told supporters in a fundraising email that its Facebook page had also been suspended for 12 hours because of the post.

Alleging that Facebook had joined the “‘Establishment’ in promotion of war with Syria and the cover up of war crimes by the Syrian Rebels,” the NLF said, “They want to shut up us up.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Straining Credibility, Google, Facebook Deny Knowledge of Government Surveillance Program Now Acknowledged by Obama Admin

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Photo Credit: Galbraith/Reuters

By Dominic Rushe. America’s tech giants continued to deny any knowledge of a giant government surveillance programme called Prism, even as president Barack Obama confirmed the scheme’s existence Friday.

With their credibility about privacy issues in sharp focus, all the technology companies said to be involved in the program issued remarkably similar statements.

All said they did not allow the government “direct access” to their systems, all said they had never heard of the Prism program, and all called for greater transparency.

In a blogpost titled ‘What the…?’ Google co-founder Larry Page and chief legal officer David Drummond said the “level of secrecy” around US surveillance procedures was undermining “freedoms we all cherish.”

“First, we have not joined any program that would give the US government – or any other government – direct access to our servers. Indeed, the US government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called Prism until yesterday,” they wrote. Read more from this story HERE.

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Although Google and Facebook Deny it, UK Admits its Been Getting Info from US Gov’t Surveillance Program

By Nick Hopkins. The UK’s electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world’s biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America’s top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The documents show that GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, has had access to the system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year.

The US-run programme, called Prism, would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.

The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.

In a statement to the Guardian, GCHQ, insisted it “takes its obligations under the law very seriously”. Read more from this story HERE.

Sarah Palin: “America, We are So Screwed”

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By Sarah Palin, Facebook.

We’re in for a helluva’ ride, America. Obama just named Susan Rice as his National Security Adviser and nominated Samantha Power to replace Rice as our U.N. ambassador. Samantha Power is married to Cass Sunstein, the very, very strange Obama pick for an early “czar” position who wowed us with his numerous bizarre claims including the wacko belief that animals should have the right to sue in court, that hunting should be banned as genocide, and that pet ownership is akin to “slavery.” But Mrs. Cass Sunstein’s character judgment in choosing her life partner is the least of America’s worries. Information about Obama’s new picks will be revealed in coming days. Pay attention to who they are; what they stand for; and what their records, associations, and statements reveal about them and their intentions. Especially consider Obama’s chosen ones as evidence of his skewed thinking as he “fundamentally transforms” our great nation.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sarah Palin Blasts Sebelius for Denying Girl’s Lifesaving Lung Transplant

By Steven Ertelt. Former governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is blasting HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for becoming a one-woman death panel. Sebelius is denying a young girl a lifesaving lung transplant — forcing the girl’s family to look to the courts for help.

Paling blasted Sebelius on Twitter and Facebook. In her Facebook post, Palin said recalled how much criticism she received for decrying “death panels” in Obamacare:

The government will bend the rules left and right to harass targeted taxpayers, conservative patriots, selected journalists, etc., but it will strictly exercise inconsistent and subjective rules to deny a child a shot at life. And they called us liars when we spoke of “death panels” – faceless bureaucrats coming between you and your doctor to make life and death decisions about a loved one’s survival. It doesn’t sound so far fetched anymore, does it? Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Admin. Mining Facebook, Twitter to Predict Crimes

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Photo Credit: WND

Clues to the federal government’s reason for collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers may be found in a recently unearthed 2010 project seeking to predict criminal activity using vast quantities of data on citizens mined from social network websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

In February, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the Massachusetts-based multinational corporation, Raytheon – the world’s fifth largest defense contractor – had developed a “Google for Spies” operation.

Herald reporter Ryan Gallagher wrote that Raytheon had “secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites” like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.

The software is called RIOT, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology.

Raytheon told the Herald it has not sold RIOT to any clients but admitted that, in 2010, it had shared the program’s software technology with the U.S. government as part of a “joint research and development effort … to help build a national security system capable of analyzing ‘trillions of entities’ from cyberspace.”

Read more from this story HERE.

GOP Senator’s Wife Warns Strippers to Stay Away from Her Husband

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Photo Credit: Facebook

A Facebook post by the wife of Alabama Sen. Shadrack McGill on Monday night was prompted by incidents during McGill’s last legislative campaign, including one in which two strippers showed up at his home in the middle of the night, McGill told AL.com Tuesday.

“As we get into the campaign season, we have concern whether we’ll have to deal with that kind of thing again,” Sen. McGill told AL.com Tuesday.

On Monday, McGill’s wife, Heather, wrote in a Facebook post that women had used the social network to approach her husband “multiple times” since his election in 2010, and warned those women to stay away, or face public scorn. She asked that women stop sending pictures to her husband’s account.

“Next time everyone will know who you are!!” McGill wrote. “For I will publicly share your name before we ‘unfriend’ you.”

Sen. McGill, R-Woodville, said Tuesday that her wife’s frustrations “kind of built up from even the campaign,” in 2010, when McGill ran against and defeated then-Sen. Lowell Barron, D-Fyffe.

Read more from this story HERE.