U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens

Posted on December 13, 2012

I am only sharing this because I think it is important to know what is going on, and also knowing that there are steps to protect yourself.   We all have to decide what is important to us and I how we view our privacy in this day and age.  Not included in this is the article published a while back about our social score.  Just like a credit score we now have a social score as well.  Do you know yours?  …S. Stevens

By MGA – AskMarion

U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens

Wall Street Journal – By JULIA ANGWIN

12-13-2013
Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.
Not everyone was on board. "This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public," Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.
A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.
Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency—how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored—and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.
The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.
But the Federal Privacy Act allows agencies to exempt themselves from many requirements by placing notices in the Federal Register, the government’s daily publication of proposed rules. In practice, these privacy-act notices are rarely contested by government watchdogs or members of the public. "All you have to do is publish a notice in the Federal Register and you can do whatever you want," says Robert Gellman, a privacy consultant who advises agencies on how to comply with the Privacy Act.
As a result, the National Counterterrorism Center program’s opponents within the administration—led by Ms. Callahan of Homeland Security—couldn’t argue that the program would violate the law. Instead, they were left to question whether the rules were good policy.
Under the new rules issued in March, the National Counterterrorism Center, known as NCTC, can obtain almost any database the government collects that it says is "reasonably believed" to contain "terrorism information." The list could potentially include almost any government database, from financial forms submitted by people seeking federally backed mortgages to the health records of people who sought treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals.
Previous government proposals to scrutinize massive amounts of data about innocent people have caused an uproar. In 2002, the Pentagon’s research arm proposed a program called Total Information Awareness that sought to analyze both public and private databases for terror clues. It would have been far broader than the NCTC’s current program, examining many nongovernmental pools of data as well.
"If terrorist organizations are going to plan and execute attacks against the United States, their people must engage in transactions and they will leave signatures," the program’s promoter, Admiral John Poindexter, said at the time. "We must be able to pick this signal out of the noise."
Adm. Poindexter’s plans drew fire from across the political spectrum over the privacy implications of sorting through every single document available about U.S. citizens. Conservative columnist William Safire called the plan a "supersnoop’s dream." Liberal columnist Molly Ivins suggested it could be akin to fascism. Congress eventually defunded the program.
The National Counterterrorism Center’s ideas faced no similar public resistance. For one thing, the debate happened behind closed doors. In addition, unlike the Pentagon, the NCTC was created in 2004 specifically to use data to connect the dots in the fight against terrorism.
Even after eight years in existence, the agency isn’t well known. "We’re still a bit of a startup and still having to prove ourselves," said director Matthew Olsen in a rare public appearance this summer at the Aspen Institute, a leadership think tank.
The agency’s offices are tucked away in an unmarked building set back from the road in the woodsy suburban neighborhood of McLean, Va. Many employees are on loan from other agencies, and they don’t conduct surveillance or gather clues directly. Instead, they analyze data provided by others.
The agency’s best-known product is a database called TIDE, which stands for the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. TIDE contains more than 500,000 identities suspected of terror links. Some names are known or suspected terrorists; others are terrorists’ friends and families; still more are people with some loose affiliation to a terrorist.
TIDE files are important because they are used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to compile terrorist "watchlists." These are lists that can block a person from boarding an airplane or obtaining a visa.
Quickly, NCTC was flooded with terror tips—each of which it was obligated to "exhaustively" pursue. By May 2010 there was a huge backlog, according a report by the Government Accountability Office.
Legal obstacles emerged. NCTC analysts were permitted to query federal-agency databases only for "terrorism datapoints," say, one specific person’s name, or the passengers on one particular flight. They couldn’t look through the databases trolling for general "patterns." And, if they wanted to copy entire data sets, they were required to remove information about innocent U.S. people "upon discovery."
But they didn’t always know who was innocent. A person might seem innocent today, until new details emerge tomorrow.
"What we learned from Christmas Day"—from the failed underwear bomb—was that some information "might seem more relevant later," says Mr. Joel, the national intelligence agency’s civil liberties officer. "We realized we needed it to be retained longer."
Late last year, for instance, NCTC obtained an entire database from Homeland Security for analysis, according to a person familiar with the transaction. Homeland Security provided the disks on the condition that NCTC would remove all innocent U.S. person data after 30 days.
After 30 days, a Homeland Security team visited and found that the data hadn’t yet been removed. In fact, NCTC hadn’t even finished uploading the files to its own computers, that person said. It can take weeks simply to upload and organize the mammoth data sets.
Homeland Security granted a 30-day extension. That deadline was missed, too. So Homeland Security revoked NCTC’s access to the data.
To fix problems like these that had cropped up since the Abdulmutallab incident, NCTC proposed the major expansion of its powers that would ultimately get debated at the March meeting in the White House. It moved to ditch the requirement that it discard the innocent-person data. And it asked for broader authority to troll for patterns in the data.
As early as February 2011, NCTC’s proposal was raising concerns at the privacy offices of both Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, according to emails reviewed by the Journal.
Privacy offices are a relatively new phenomenon in the intelligence community. Most were created at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. Privacy officers are often in the uncomfortable position of identifying obstacles to plans proposed by their superiors.
At the Department of Justice, Chief Privacy Officer Nancy Libin raised concerns about whether the guidelines could unfairly target innocent people, these people said. Some research suggests that, statistically speaking, there are too few terror attacks for predictive patterns to emerge. The risk, then, is that innocent behavior gets misunderstood—say, a man buying chemicals (for a child’s science fair) and a timer (for the sprinkler) sets off false alarms.
An August government report indicates that, as of last year, NCTC wasn’t doing predictive pattern-matching.
The internal debate was more heated at Homeland Security. Ms. Callahan and colleague Margo Schlanger, who headed the 100-person Homeland Security office for civil rights and civil liberties, were concerned about the implications of turning over vast troves of data to the counterterrorism center, these people said.
They and Ms. Libin at the Justice Department argued that the failure to catch Mr. Abdulmutallab wasn’t caused by the lack of a suspect—he had already been flagged—but by a failure to investigate him fully. So amassing more data about innocent people wasn’t necessarily the right solution.
The most sensitive Homeland Security data trove at stake was the Advanced Passenger Information System. It contains the name, gender, birth date and travel information for every airline passenger entering the U.S.
Previously, Homeland Security had pledged to keep passenger data only for 12 months. But NCTC was proposing to copy and keep it for up to five years. Ms. Callahan argued this would break promises the agency had made to the public about its use of personal data, these people said.
Discussions sometimes got testy, according to emails reviewed by the Journal. In one case, Ms. Callahan sent an email complaining that "examples" provided to her by an unnamed intelligence official were "complete non-sequiturs" and "non-responsive."
In May 2011, Ms. Callahan and Ms. Schlanger raised their concerns with the chief of their agency, Janet Napolitano. They fired off a memo under the longwinded title, "How Best to Express the Department’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Concerns over Draft Guidelines Proposed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center," according to an email obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The contents of the memo, which appears to run several pages, were redacted.
The two also kept pushing the NCTC officials to justify why they couldn’t search for terrorism clues less invasively, these people said. "I’m not sure I’m totally prepared with the firestorm we’re about to create," Ms. Schlanger emailed Ms. Callahan in November, referring to the fact that the two wanted more privacy protections. Ms. Schlanger returned to her faculty position at the University of Michigan Law School soon after but remains an adviser to Homeland Security.
To resolve the issue, Homeland Security’s deputy secretary, Jane Holl Lute, requested the March meeting at the White House. The second in command from Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the FBI, NCTC and the office of the director of national intelligence sat at the small conference table. Normal protocol for such meeting is for staffers such as Ms. Callahan to sit against the walls of the room and keep silent.
By this point, Ms. Libin’s concern that innocent people could be inadvertently targeted had been largely overruled at the Department of Justice, these people said. Colleagues there were more concerned about missing the next terrorist threat.
That left Ms. Callahan as the most prominent opponent of the proposed changes. In an unusual move, Ms. Lute asked Ms. Callahan to speak about Homeland Security’s privacy concerns. Ms. Callahan argued that the rules would constitute a "sea change" because, whenever citizens interact with the government, the first question asked will be, are they a terrorist?
Mr. Brennan considered the arguments. And within a few days, the attorney general, Eric Holder, had signed the new guidelines. The Justice Department declined to comment about the debate over the guidelines.
Under the new rules, every federal agency must negotiate terms under which it would hand over databases to NCTC. This year, Ms. Callahan left Homeland Security for private practice, and Ms. Libin left the Justice Department to join a private firm.
Homeland Security is currently working out the details to give the NCTC three data sets—the airline-passenger database known as APIS; another airline-passenger database containing information about non-U.S. citizen visitors to the U.S.; and a database about people seeking refugee asylum. It previously agreed to share databases containing information about foreign-exchange students and visa applications.
Once the terms are set, Homeland Security is likely to post a notice in the Federal Register. The public can submit comments to the Federal Register about proposed changes, although Homeland Security isn’t required to make changes based on the comments.
Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared December 13, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: U.S. Terror Agency To Tap Citizen Files.
http://www.peoplesmart.com is just one site where people can get info on you by just knowing your email.

Tracking You

Wall Street Journal
Georgia resident Andy Morar is in the market for a BMW. So recently he sent a note to a showroom near Atlanta, using a form on the dealer’s website to provide his name and contact information.
His note went to the dealership—but it also went, without his knowledge, to a company that tracks car shoppers online. In a flash, an analysis of the auto websites Mr. Morar had anonymously visited could be paired with his real name and studied by his local car dealer.
When told that a salesman on the showroom floor could, in effect, peer into his computer activities at home, Mr. Morar said: "The less they know, the better."
The widening ability to associate people’s real-life identities with their browsing habits marks a privacy milestone, further blurring the already unclear border between our public and private lives. In pursuit of ever more precise and valuable information about potential customers, tracking companies are redefining what it means to be anonymous.
Consider Dataium LLC, the company that can track car shoppers like Mr. Morar. Dataium said that shoppers’ Web browsing is still anonymous, even though it can be tied to their names. The reason: Dataium does not give dealers click-by-click details of people’s Web surfing history but rather an analysis of their interests.
The use of real identities across the Web is going mainstream at a rapid clip. A Wall Street Journal examination of nearly 1,000 top websites found that 75% now include code from social networks, such as Facebook‘s FB +3.63% "Like" or Twitter’s "Tweet" buttons. Such code can match people’s identities with their Web-browsing activities on an unprecedented scale and can even track a user’s arrival on a page if the button is never clicked.
In separate research, the Journal examined what happens when people logged in to roughly 70 popular websites that request a login and found that more than a quarter of the time, the sites passed along a user’s real name, email address or other personal details, such as username, to third-party companies. One major dating site passed along a person’s self-reported sexual orientation and drug-use habits to advertising companies.
As recently as late 2010, when the Journal wrote about Rapleaf Inc., a trailblazing company that had devised a way to track people online by email address, the practice was almost unheard-of. Today, companies like Dataium are taking the techniques to a new level.
Tracking a car-shopper online gives dealers an edge because not only can they tell if the person is serious—is he really shopping for red convertibles or just fantasizing?—but they can also gain a detailed understanding of the specific vehicles and options the person likes. "So when he comes in to the dealership, I know now how to approach" him, said Dataium co-founder Jason Ezell to a car-dealer conference last year, which was videotaped and posted online.
Mr. Morar, a 38-year-old hotel owner who lives in Savannah, Ga., has been looking carefully at the 2013 BMW X5 sport-utility vehicle, checking recent sale prices for specific configurations. Dataium declined to say specifically what, if anything, it knows about him.
Dataium said dealers can see only an analysis of the person’s behavior, not the raw details of every car site a person visits. The information is tied to people’s email addresses only when people provide them to a dealer voluntarily, Dataium said.
The company that owns the dealership Mr. Morar visited, Asbury Automotive Group Inc., ABG +0.63% said it gives privacy notices to customers "regarding the use of nonpublic personal information." It declined to comment on whether it had used information about Mr. Morar provided by Dataium.

illustrations by Jason Lee
Companies that conduct online tracking have long argued that the information they collect is anonymous, and therefore innocuous. But the industry’s definition of "anonymous" has shifted over time.
After an epic regulatory battle in the early 2000s over Web privacy, the online ad industry generally concluded that "anonymous" meant that a firm had no access to "PII," the industry term for "personally identifiable information." Now, however, some companies describe tracking or advertising as anonymous even if they have or use people’s real names or email addresses.
Their argument: It’s still anonymous because the identity information is removed, protected or separated from browsing history. Facebook Inc., for example, offers a service that shows ads to groups of people based on email address, but only if advertisers already have that address. Facebook says that it doesn’t give people’s email addresses to the advertiser.

"We will serve ads to you based on your identity," said Erin Egan, chief privacy officer at Facebook, "but that doesn’t mean you’re identifiable." Facebook, Rapleaf and other companies also say that they anonymize their data.
How does anonymization work? A website uses a formula to turn its users’ email addresses into jumbled strings of numbers and letters. An advertiser does the same with its customer email lists. Both then send their jumbled lists to a third company that looks for matches. When two match, the website can show an ad targeted to a specific person, but no real email addresses changed hands.
Still, the sheer ease with which personal details can be shared online makes it difficult for people to know whether their information is safe. A Wall Street Journal survey of 50 popular websites, plus the Journal’s own site, found that 12 sent potentially identifying information such as email addresses or full real names to third parties.
The Journal tested an additional 20 sites that deal with sensitive information, including sites dealing with personal relationships, medical information and children. Nine of these sent potentially identifying information elsewhere.
Sometimes the information was encoded and sent in a special transmission to another company. Other times, though, people’s names were simply included in the title or address of the Web page. This information gets sent automatically to every ad company with a presence on a Web page unless the website owner takes steps to prevent it.
The Journal’s own website shared considerable amounts of users’ personal information. It sent the email addresses and real names of users to three companies. The site also transmitted other details, including gender and birth year, which WSJ.com allows people to submit when they fill out their website profile.
A Journal spokeswoman said that most of the sharing of personally identifiable information was unintentional and was being corrected. The only intentional sharing of identity information, she said, was an encoded version of the user’s email address, provided to a company that sends marketing emails to readers who opt to receive them. She said the Journal makes companies it works with sign a policy that would prevent them from using improper data they receive.
Another site sharing considerable information, the free dating service OKCupid, sent usernames to one company; gender, age and ZIP Code to seven companies; sexual orientation to two companies; and drug-use information—do you use drugs "never," "sometimes" or "often"?—to six companies. It also sent an anonymized version of email addresses to a firm that says it uses them to help businesses get information about customers in their email lists.
"None of this information is personally identifiable," said OKCupid’s chief executive officer, Sam Yagan. He said OKCupid, owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, IACI +0.31% is upfront with users about the amount of data it collects. "Advertising is and always will be part of the business model. It allows the product to be free," he said.
The regulatory clash over Web privacy in the early 2000s established ground rules that today are being tested. At that time, the Federal Trade Commission investigated the merger of the online-ad company DoubleClick Inc. with a traditional mailing-list giant, Abacus Direct, over concerns that Abacus would merge its lists of people’s real names and addresses with DoubleClick’s Web-browsing profiles.
DoubleClick (now owned by Google GOOG +1.21% Inc.) eventually agreed not to do that. The dispute spawned an industry self-regulatory group that pledged not to link personally identifiable information to Web browsing unless the person opted in.
But the allure of real identities remains. After all, that’s how most companies keep track of their customers. Brick-and-mortar shops can "capture things like name, city and email address" when a person buys something or signs up for a loyalty card, said a Yahoo Inc. YHOO +0.70% official.
Yahoo offers a service, Audience Match, that lets retailers find and target their customers online. Yahoo says that it uses anonymization and doesn’t give names or Web-browsing information to advertisers.
In the past, tracking companies and retailers had a tougher time identifying online users. Today, a single Web page can contain computer code from dozens of different ad companies or tracking firms. These separate chunks of code often share information with each other. For example: If, like Mr. Morar the car-shopper, you give your name to a website, it can sometimes be seen by other companies with ads or special coding on the site.
It’s so easy to share such information that many of the sites the Journal contacted said they were doing so accidentally. The problem is easy to solve, but it has persisted for years.
Craig Wills, a computer-science professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, published research in 2011 showing that 56% of more than 100 websites leaked pieces of private information in ways similar to those found in the Journal’s study. "Information goes in, but we don’t know if it’s being dropped and ignored or saved for later use," he said.
The rise of social networks is also making it easier to tie people’s real identities to their online behavior. The "Like" button, for instance, can send information back to Facebook whenever Facebook users visit pages that have the button, even if they don’t click it.
These buttons and related code give social networks, which often know people’s real names, an unprecedented overview of online behavior. The Journal found that Facebook code appears on 67% of the more than 900 sites of the top 1,000 that were scanned by BuiltWith.com, a service that examines websites and the technologies they use. That is up from about 63% a year or so ago. Code from Twitter Inc. was on nearly 54% of sites, up from 43%. Code from the Google+ social network was on almost 30% of sites examined, up from just 12% in December 2011.
Google said it keeps its social-networking data separate from its ad-tracking network and doesn’t use the data from unclicked Google+ buttons. Twitter says it analyzes the data from its unclicked buttons to recommend other people a user might want to follow, but not for other purposes. Facebook says it uses data from unclicked "Like" buttons only for security purposes and to fix bugs in its software.
Facebook has been expanding its ad services that use identification data. This year, the company began telling advertisers how much sales in stores increased as a result of ads on Facebook—even if the products were purchased offline. To achieve this, Facebook says it works with a company, Datalogix, that controls a vast database culled from people’s use of loyalty-card programs.
Dataium, the company that watches car shoppers, is also able to tie online shopping data to people’s names, according to its public statements. Based in Nashville, Tenn., Dataium was founded in 2009 by Mr. Ezell, who had previously founded a company that created websites for auto dealers, and by Eric Brown, who had experience in marketing.
The two realized that the auto industry "is trying to sell the consumer a car they want the consumer to buy, not a car the consumer wants to buy," Mr. Brown, the company’s chief executive, said in an email.
Mr. Brown said that the vast majority of Dataium’s business involves providing general data about online car-shopping trends. But the company also enables dealers to see information about people in their customer database—in other words, people who have given the dealer their names and email addresses.
On its website, Dataium says it observes more than 20 million shoppers across 10,000 car websites, although it doesn’t claim to have identification information on everyone. Mr. Brown said personally identifiable information is "less than 1%" of total data sent to Dataium.
Dataium knows "all the websites [a] person has visited in the shopping process" and "all the vehicles this person has looked at," Mr. Ezell said at last year’s car-dealer conference. So if someone looked only at Nissans, the salesman will know he needn’t discuss other cars, "because I know he’s a loyal Nissan shopper." For users who are identifiable, Dataium is able to add analysis based on these observations to their name.
Asbury Automotive Group, which owns 77 dealerships including Nalley BMW, the site Mr. Morar visited, announced last year that it was using Dataium’s code "to obtain a greater understanding of how auto shoppers are engaging" with its stores.
Mr. Morar, the Savannah car-shopper, is still in the market for a BMW sport-utility vehicle. He has twin 8-year-olds, and they need some elbow room, he says.
But scoring the best price will be important to him, which is why he has been doing lots of research online. "I’m just trying to get as much information as I can so when I do go to the dealer I’m prepared," he said. "There’s that mentality that all car dealers are out to get you."
—Ashkan Soltani contributed to this article.
Write to Jennifer Valentino-DeVries at Jennifer.Valentino-DeVries@wsj.com
They Know What You’re Shopping For
‘You’re looking at the premium package, right?’ Companies today are increasingly tying people’s real-life identities to their online browsing habits.
Which Websites Are Sharing Your Personal Details?
To identify what personal information gets passed to other companies when you log in to popular websites, The Wall Street Journal tested 50 of the top sites (by U.S. traffic) that offer registration, excluding sites that required a real-world account, such as banking sites. The Journal also tested 20 selected other sites that focus on sensitive subjects such as dating, politics, health, or children’s issues, and our own site, WSJ.com. Click here to read more about the methodology. Results for each site are below. Sites are ranked by popularity, based on comScore’s numbers. Sites not in comScore’s top 1,000 are marked with a "*". Click on the rows for more details.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324784404578143144132736214.html#project%3DANONYMITY1212%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive
Sites Sharing Personal Details: The Journal’s Methodology
December 7, 2012
By WSJ Staff
The Wall Street Journal tested 50 of the most popular sites in the U.S. – plus WSJ.com and 20 additional websites in sensitive categories – to identify data about their registered users they passed to other companies.
In choosing sites to test, the Journal drew primarily from Web measurement firm ComScore’s list of the 1,000 most popular sites, as of June 2012. The Journal tested the top 50 sites that allowed users to register, excluding sites that required a real-world account, such as banking sites.
In addition, the Journal selected popular sites in categories deemed to be sensitive – children’s sites, political sites, medical sites and sites for dating and relationships. These sites were selected from the ComScore list as well as from a list by measurement firm Quantcast.
The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com. The Journal’s methodology was based in part on techniques used by Balachander Krishnamurthy of AT&T Labs and Konstantin Naryshkin and Craig Wills of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in a 2011 study. For each site on its list, the Journal created an account, entering name, username, email address, birth date, location, password and other information.
The Journal followed each site’s suggested registration procedure, including email confirmation when necessary. In addition to registering, the Journal logged out of each account, logged back in, and browsed all known types of pages on the site – for instance, article pages, profile pages and setting pages. The Journal cleared its test computer of tracking files, known as cookies, between each browsing session.
During each browsing session, the Journal used mitmproxy, an open-source software program, to inspect the data being transmitted to and from the sites. This method reveals all data being passed via the Web browser. This serves as a “lower bound” for data sharing; companies can also pass data behind the scenes. Transfers of information to the sites themselves – or to domains owned by these “first-party” sites – were not counted as data leakage unless the domain served a significantly different purpose from that of the original site.
Also excluded was information that, while related to identity, might not actually divulge information about the specific user. For example, a social-networking site might structure its public Web pages in the format http://site.com/username; although this site contains a person’s username, it is not clear that the person viewing that site is, in fact, the user.
In rare cases, the Journal conducted closer inspections of data being sent, based on information seen during the registration process. Extra data observed in this manner is recorded in notes for each site. The Journal also sought confirmation and comment from each of the sites that transmitted or received data.
– Jeremy Singer-Vine and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
To See Full Privacy Coverage:  http://online.wsj.com/public/page/what-they-know-digital-privacy.html?mod=WSJ_topnav_na_tech
HTTPS Everywhere is produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS, but make it difficult to use. For instance, they may default to unencrypted HTTP, or fill encrypted pages with links that go back to the unencrypted site. The HTTPS Everywhere extension fixes these problems by using a clever technology to rewrite requests to these sites to HTTPS.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Alert: Big Win On Internet Regulation!

DickMorris.com: Thankfully, the UN negotiations on Internet regulation collapsed yesterday in Dubai when the U.S. and Canada announced that they would refuse to support or sign any treaty that gave the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) the power to regulate the Internet.
They specifically rejected the efforts of Vladimir Putin’s Russia to control the Internet through international treaty. Russia had sought to give each country the power to manage the Internet within their own countries and Putin’s ally Toure, the head of the ITU, sought to charge Google and other content sites for any videos used internationally. The goal in these charges was to make it prohibitively expensive for Russians to download video from foreign providers.
Russia had obtained support from a strong majority of world governments because each found it in their interest to suppress the Internet at home. Our hope was that the U.S. would block the treaty and it did!
The death knell of Internet regulation is particularly welcome to us at DickMorris.com. We have collected 100,000 petition signatures against the proposed treaty, which we first outed in our book Here Come the Black Helicopters!: UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom. Our book was the first to explain the threat of the treaty, which had previously been negotiated in secret behind closed doors.
Coupled with the Senate rejection of the Treaty on the Disabled, these two new developments show success in rolling back the power grab of the UN.
Thank you for your help in blocking these treaties!

“He who trades freedom for security, (liberty for safety or privacy for convenience) rarely gets or deserves either!” Benjamin Franklin

Related:
Why We Are So Rude Online
Now Big Brother is REALLY watching you
RFID Chip for all Americans in 2013 as Part of ObamaCare… See Biden Telling Fed Judge He Will Have to Rule on Implanted Microchips
RFID Clothing Tags Would Not Be Private Labels
Today… A Car That Takes Your Pulse, Tomorrow A Card or Implant That Controls Your Life
FBI begins installation of $1 billion face recognition system across America
Wear radio chip or leave, school tells students  -  Christian Family Refuses Mandatory RFID Chip at Texas School
Today it is social and marketing data, medical records and supposedly counterterrorism?!?  Tomorrow? - Video: Smart card (made 2005) You be the judge~
Nineteen Eighty-Four

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