Excerpt: "It's unclear exactly why, but the Department of Homeland has been operating a "Social Networking/Media Capability" program to monitor the top blogs, forums and social networks online for at least the past 18 months." Sadly, R-burg does not appear on the list.....
Unlike the New York Times, Rantburg doesn't need to troll for readers.
#4
Reading newspapers, aka Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), is a main stay of intelligence services everywhere. Why is extending this to the internet that much different? Drudges front page is public.
Posted by: Mike Ramsey ||
01/12/2012 13:32 Comments ||
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#5
It depends on why and for what purpose HS is monitoring the various sites. The sites are public sites. Somebody in HS gets paid to look at news and other interesting stuff? Most of the rest of us do it for nothing.
#6
I imagine a lot of those who visit Rantburg come from ".mil" and ".gov" domains, and their foreign equivalents. Also a goodly number of ".edu", which can be a lot of things.
#7
JohnQC,
Many (if not all) US military commands have CNN and FoxNews running to provide situational awareness. Are you going to wait for the Pentagon to tell you about airplanes hitting skyscrapers in NYC? Ask the Pacific Fleet HQ at Perl Harbor about that Telegram that Washington sent back on December 7, 1941.
While SNA (Social Network Analysis) can be applied to other things than, well, Social Networks, it can and is being applied to Facebook, et al.
Posted by: Mike Ramsey ||
01/12/2012 16:37 Comments ||
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[Bloomberg] For last year's 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, U.S. Transportation Security Administration officials wanted their workers to remember the thousands who died. So the agency bought 70,000 commemorative bracelets -- made in China. Well, y'see, we can't cost-effectively manufacture bracelets in this country anymore.
The wristbands were among as much as $84 billion in U.S. contracts (USBOTOTA) awarded for foreign goods and services in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, mostly through exemptions from legislation designed to restrict such deals. Foreign purchases by federal agencies also included rocket launchers and machine guns from Bulgaria, as well as generic cholesterol medication for U.S. veterans that came from plants in India.
A Buy American Act from 1933 and similar measures since then have become so riddled with loopholes that some U.S. politicians are saying enough. Three senators proposed legislation last month to expand domestic preference rules and require agencies seeking made-in-America waivers to publish their plans on the Internet and allow time for public comment.
"A major objective of our bill is to demand accountability and ensure waivers are not being overused to allow for the purchase of foreign products when there is a quality, American- made alternative available," U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat sponsoring the legislation, said in an e- mailed statement.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/12/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
China has some other loopholes. When it comes to resources move over.
#2
"A major objective of our bill is to demand accountability and ensure waivers are not being overused to allow for the purchase of foreign products when there is a quality, American- made alternative available,"
Says a politician whose profession is predicted upon making loopholes for bribes campaign donations. You think Congress will demand the same standards for itself in the implementation of waivers and set asides? Heh.
Judge A. Wallace Tashima of U.S. District Court in Tucson issued an order finding that students in the Tucson Unified School District can sue the state and challenge the constitutionality of the law that bans racially divisive courses in Arizona schools.
Just before the district's governing board on Tuesday decided to suspend the controversial Mexican-American studies courses, to prevent the loss of millions of dollars of state aid, the judge decided that students have legal standing to pursue a federal case that argues the state law violates their First Amendment rights.
Tashima wrote that Lopez has standing in the argument that her constitutional rights are under threat because the Mexican-American studies courses she wants to take next fall are at risk of elimination and because, under the law, the state appears to be trying to restrict her First Amendment right to the Mexican-American studies texts and materials that it finds objectionable.
By providing the court a list of the classes she would take, including Mexican-American studies courses, "Lopez has established a concrete and non-speculative injury sufficient to establish standing," Tashima wrote. So students have the constitutional right to demand that schools must provide them the curriculum they want, even if it is racist, secessionist, factually incorrect and anti-American in character? Wonder if students have a constitutional right to demand schools provide them with a grounding in western civilization and traditional ethics that is egalitarian, correct and pro-American. No, on second thought I don't wonder at all...
#3
Tashima is a Carter appointee. 30 years later, he's continuing to impose his personal ideology over the wishes of the majority. Guys like him are why conservatives must vote Republican come election day. An Obama win would mean more anti-majoritarian judges like Tashima.
#4
...it's also the result of the abdication of power by the legislative branch to the other two. Bad behavior, and nothing stops Congress from defining that themselves, is the basis of removal. The immunity of the judiciary is no less than that of princes and other titled nobility that pre-dated Independence.
#7
George Will said, some years back, that "the three R's are now Racism, Recycling and Reproduction."
Time to get rid of the system and replace it with something that teaches only basic skills that can demonstrably be used to get a job or move on to higher education.
While we are at it, (a crazy dream, I know) squeeze the UN financially until there is a new human rights resolution that totally outlaws ideological indoctrination in ANY school. It will hit madrassas and US public schools equally hard.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
01/12/2012 13:32 Comments ||
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#8
Just get the state out of the provision of School.
#9
Wow, you mean I have a constitutional right to state funded Mexican-American studies in high school? They didn't have that where I went to high school. Does that mean I can sue? For how much?
But I don't remember where it says in the First Amendment that I have a right to state funded Mexican-American studies texts.
#10
Is the state saying that Senorita Lopez may not buy the books, or that they cannot be published? No. They are simply saying that they don't want to pay for them. If Senorita Lopez wants to read that tripe, she is free to purchase them with her own money.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
01/12/2012 20:17 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
