New World Order: The path to complete control

America may have reached a turning point on July 22, 2003 in the battle to restore and protect civil liberties threatened by the Patriot Act. On that day the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to pass two amendments that restore the rule of law by denying the Justice Department the ability to sneak into private homes and peek at private records without a warrant.
The House also unanimously passed an amendment to prohibit the Justice Department from forcing libraries and bookstores to turn over records of books read by their patrons.
- See more at: http://americanpolicy.org/2003/08/06/losing-our-liberty-in-the-name-of-fighting-terrorism/#sthash.WStzeuY0.dpuf

Our civil liberties, freedoms, and privacy have reached a breaking point and are rapidly disappearing before our very eyes. In the name of fighting terrorism our government has become an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present beast that has invaded every aspect of the peoples' lives, and not just here in America. This display of unbridled tyranny is the precursor for the mark of the beast of Revelation 13. -Advent Messenger Commentary

 

The feds’ push for Big Data

Politico | May 14, 2014

Far from cracking down on the monitoring of consumer information, the Obama administration has often sought to leverage the power of big data — sometimes running afoul of privacy advocates.

“Big data technology stands to improve nearly all the services the public sector delivers,” the recent White House report on big data concluded.

Among the administration’s initiatives:

• The FBI is building a huge facial recognition database — which will also include palm prints and iris scans — to augment its fingerprint collection. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports it will hold as many as 52 million facial images by the end of next year, including pictures of people who have never been arrested.

• The Treasury Department has launched a program to scan several government databases — and, in the future, perhaps commercial databases as well — for information about individuals due to receive federal payments. The aim: To identify anyone who might be ineligible to receive the payment, or might be suspected of committing fraud, before the check goes in the mail.

• The Defense Department is considering mining commercial databases as well, to scan for worrisome information about employees and contractors who hold classified clearance. Most are officially vetted only every five to 10 years; the Pentagon is eager for more frequent checks that could disclose drug arrests, domestic violence charges, financial troubles or other red flags.

The Education Department has also been a major proponent of big data. It has used policy and financial incentives, including more than $500 million in direct grants, to prod states to build longitudinal databases that will track students’ progress from pre-K through high school and in some cases, into college and the workforce. States will mine the data to spot patterns; they might, for instance, be able to identify behaviors in 6-year-olds that indicate the child has an elevated risk of dropping out of high school a decade later.

The department has also relaxed privacy rules to make it easier for school districts to share student records with state and federal officials, as well as with private companies, without parental consent. Privacy advocates sued to block some of those changes, but lost in court.

However, privacy activists have won a few other tussles with the administration.

In February, the Department of Homeland Security floated a proposal to hire a private contractor to create a national database of license-plate photos to track vehicle movements. DHS officials hoped the database would make it easier to arrest “absconders and criminal aliens,” but after the Washington Post published details — and privacy advocates reacted with anger — the plans were scrapped.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which regulates securities brokers, also had to back off a big data proposal it laid out late last year. The plan was to require brokers to submit information on their customers’ transactions so FINRA could scan the accounts for red flags. The ACLU objected, saying the system would “leave Americans vulnerable to invasive and unwarranted monitoring.” By March, FINRA had backed off, promising that brokers would not need to identify account owners by name when submitting transaction records.

While the administration’s big data task force, led by White House counselor John Podesta, noted the potential benefits of government data mining, it also laid out a clear warning. “Once information about citizens is compiled for a defined purpose, the temptation to use it for other purposes can be considerable….” the report warned. “If unchecked, big data could be a tool that substantially expands government power over citizens.”

Source: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/feds-big-data-106650.html#ixzz32AutiuNj