Wednesday 07-06-16

I love it when they use the argument that they are saving money to do it this way, they are not saving you money, it is your money they are spending.

 

US Government Approved 100% Of Wiretap Applications In 2015

A 10-year study shows the U.S. wiretaps increasingly often and effectively

A ten-year study of how state and federal law enforcement wiretaps suspects shows that the government is extremely efficient at the practice, and is only getting better.
The new report, conducted by the Federal Judiciary, looked at the prevalence of the FBI and state and local police petitioning for a warrant to surveil someone. Methods range from tracking their computer activity to bugging a home telephone or a room, though it overwhelmingly—96 percent of the time 2015—meant tracking or listening to their cell phone calls. It has become a common enough practice that in a ten-year span, a wiretap request has been denied only eight times, and never more than twice in a year. According to the report, “No wiretap applications were reported as denied in 2015.”

And while the number of wiretaps that courts approve has steadily risen over the past decade, to the point where they’ve more than doubled from 1,774 in 2005 to 4,148 in 2015, wiretapping has become a more cost-effective process.

Of note is that despite FBI director James Comey’s repeated insistence of an endemic of terrorists and other criminals “going dark”—using chat programs that use end-to-end encryption, like iMessage or WhatsApp, making it impossible to easily understand a wiretapped message—only six federal wiretaps were reported encrypted in 2015, and two of those were successfully decrypted. It’s rare at the state level, too: 22 instances of intercepted information being encrypted were reported in 2014, but only seven in 2015.
http://www.vocativ.com/336409/united-states-wiretaps/

 

Ottawa shuts down kids' lemonade stand over permit, sparking criticism

It wasn’t long after two young sisters set up shop on a grassy roadside in Ottawa that a federal officer told them to ‘pack up and leave’

 

To the young entrepreneurs – ages 7 and 5 – it seemed like a win-win situation: Hawk ice-cold lemonade to pedestrians and cyclists on a hot day and rake in money to help pay for summer camp.  But their business plan was swiftly derailed by officials in Ottawa, who cited the girls’ lack of a permit to shut down the C$1-a-glass lemonade stand.  Eliza Andrews, 7, and her sister Adela, 5, had been running the stand on their front lawn for several weeks. As the date of their summer camp neared, the pair eyed their profit margins and considered a crucial question: location.  On Sunday they relocated, setting up shop on a grassy median that flanked a stretch of road open only to cyclists and foot traffic on Sunday mornings.  Business was just beginning to pick up – the two had earned C$52 in about an hour – when a passerby stopped to ask them if they had a permit for their lemonade stand. It wasn’t long after that a uniformed official with the National Capital Commission, a federal agency, arrived on the scene.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eliza and Adela at their lemonade stand. Photograph: Courtesy of Kurtis Andrews

“They were polite, but said we had to pack up and leave,” Kurtis Andrews, the father of the two girls, told the Toronto Star. His offer to pay for a permit on the spot yielded no compromise. “For a couple of kids, it’s kind of intimidating, with the flashing lights and guy in black uniform.” First reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the story made headlines across Canada. Many on social media took aim at Ottawa – playfully rehashing the capital’s reputation as the “city that fun forgot” – while several Conservative politicians seized on the story as an example of how government overreach can strangle entrepreneurship.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/05/ottawa-canada-lemonade-stand-shut-down-permit-backlash