Tag: posts

The latest Reason-Rupe poll asked
Americans if they would support or oppose changing the federal tax
system to a flat tax, where everyone pays the same percentage of
his or her income. The poll finds that 62 percent favor the flat
tax and 33 percent are opposed, reports Emily Ekins, the director
of polling for Reason Foundation. When asked where they would set
the flat tax, the average response was 15 percent.

View this article.

• Since taking office as president,
  Barack Obama has proposed 442 new tax increases, according to
  Americans for Tax Reform.
• Sen.
  Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says the showdown at the Bundy ranch in
  Nevada is “not over” because “we can’t have an American people that
  violate the law and then just walk away from it.”
• A grand jury was empanelled in Travis County, Texas, to
  consider criminal charges against Gov.
  Rick Perry (R-Tex.) over the withholding of funds from the
  Travis County District Attorney’s office.
• Ukraine’s president announced military forces would begin an
  anti-terrorism operation in eastern
  Ukraine aimed at the pro-Russian insurgency there.
• Masked gunmen in
  Libya kidnapped the Jordanian ambassador.
• The drone company Titan Aerospace was acquired by
  Google. Facebook previously expressed interest in the company,
  which manufactures solar-powered drones.

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“I
ran for office pledging to make our government leaner and smarter
and more consumer friendly,” President Barack Obama reminded a
group of small businessmen at a January 2012 White House gathering.
The target of Obama’s tweaking that day was the Department of
Commerce, the century-old rectangular behemoth on Constitution
Avenue. Sonny Bunch details how the department actually stifles
commerce. 

View this article.

Seirra Olivero, 13,
says she was suspended for telling other students about
their legal
rights. Olivero says she told other students at her
Sparrowbush, New York, school that did not have to take a state
English test. She says a teacher told her to “shut my mouth.” She
later got called to the principal’s office and interrogated. When
the principal refused to let her call her mother, she left the
office. School officials deny Olivero was suspended for telling
students they didn’t have to take the test. They say she was
suspended for refusing to obey administrators.

Tonight’s live episode of The
Independents (9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT, on Fox Business
Network, with repeats three hours later) has all of the above and
more, which I’d like to tell you about, but it turns out prepping
to host a breaking-news show in Kennedy’s absence can take up a lot
of time! So please go watch us talk about the Kansas shooting, and
Glenn Greenwald’s Pulitzer, and Eastern Ukraine, and Stephen
Colbert, and Charles Murray, and taxes, plus sexy after-show! Go to
http://ift.tt/QYHXdy
at 10 p.m. sharp for that latter bit.

Find us on Facebook at http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
on Twitter @ independentsFBN, and
click on this page
for video of past segments.

The Federal Bureau of
Investigation’s plan to tag and track us all is going swimmingly,
from a creepy, voyeuristic perspective, according to federal
documents. Released by the FBI in response to a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF), the records reveal plans to stick the mugs of almost one in
six Americans into the
Next Generation Identification (NGI) program’s facial
recognition database by next year.

Combined with the
more than 120 million faces in state databases and the feds’
tolerance for a remarkably high false-positive rate, your chances
of getting fingered for somebody else’s misdeeds are getting pretty
good.

According to Jennifer Lynch, Senior Staff Attorney with the EFF,

the FBI plans to have 52 million photos in its database within
months:

The records we received show that the face recognition component
of NGI may include as many as 52 million face images by 2015. By
2012, NGI already contained 13.6 million images representing
between 7 and 8 million individuals, and by the middle of 2013, the
size of the database increased to 16 million images. The new
records reveal that the database will be capable of processing
55,000 direct photo enrollments daily and of conducting tens of
thousands of searches every day.

Those 52 million images will include a planned 4.3 million faces
photographed for non-criminal purposes, but included solely for
identification purposes. Searches will be run against all records
in the database, no matter how they were obtained.

The sources for the images are varied, and a bit vague.

• 46 million criminal images
• 4.3 million civil images
• 215,000 images from the
  Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC)
• 750,000 images from a “Special Population Cognizant” (SPC)
  category
• 215,000 images from “New Repositories”

“The FBI does not define either the ‘Special Population
Cognizant’ database or the ‘new repositories’ category,” Lynch
warns. “This is a problem because we do not know what rules govern
these categories, where the data comes from, how the images are
gathered, who has access to them, and whose privacy is
impacted.”

Also, identification is a tad dependant on getting it right, and
that’s not a certainty. Last year, the Electronic Privacy
Information Center
extracted a separate set of documents from the FBI revealing
that federal specifications on the Next Generation Identifiication
system facial recognition software allow for tagging “an incorrect
candidate a maximum of 20% of the time.”

Well, so long as it’s no more than one in five, I guess that’s
OK.

The Pulitzer Prize has rendered
its vote on what it thinks of Edward Snowden’s revelation of the
National Security Agency’s (NSA) domestic surveillance techniques
today by giving a gold medal in public
service to The Guardian US and The Washington
Post for breaking the stories. The Pulitzer committee credits
the Post for helping “the public understand how the
disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security,”
while The Guardian is recognized for “helping through
aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship
between the government and the public over issues of security and
privacy.”

Snowden has already put out a
statement:

“Today’s decision is a vindication for everyone who believes
that the public has a role in government. We owe it to the efforts
of the brave reporters and their colleagues who kept working in the
face of extraordinary intimidation, including the forced
destruction of journalistic materials, the inappropriate use of
terrorism laws, and so many other means of pressure to get them to
stop what the world now recognizes was work of vital public
importance.”

Rosie Gray of
BuzzFeed tracked down NSA hard-core surveillance-defender and
Snowden-hater Rep. Pete King (R-IRA).
He told her “Anybody who got a Pulitzer in the past should give it
back. The Pulitzer Prize doesn’t mean anything now.”

The NSA responded by hacking the Twitter feed of US Airways and
distracting the world by putting up a picture of a naked woman with
a model plane in her nethers. I am kidding about the hacking, but
the
tweet actually happened and quickly became all everybody was
talking about online. It’s still not as horrifying as last year,
when the Boston Marathon bombing happened right as the winners were
being announced. (The Boston Globe got a Pulitzer for
breaking news for their coverage.)

Getting much less attention, partly because of the Snowden
debate but also because the subject just gets less attention,
The Oregonian’s editorial board won a Pulitzer Prize in
the category of editorial writing for its coverage of the state’s
pension crisis. The Pulitzer Prize committee praised “its lucid
editorials that explain the urgent but complex issue of rising
pension costs, notably engaging readers and driving home the link
between necessary solutions and their impact on everyday lives.”
The Oregonian ’s package of editorials can be read

here.

The full list of Pulitzer winners can be found here.

There’s also some interesting topics tackled by the runners-up.
The NSA coverage beat out a report by Newsday of concealed
police abuse and misconduct by the Long Island police. And The
Oregonian beat out editorials at the Des Moines
Register challenging Iowa’s restrictive licensing laws.

Many conservatives are furious at Brandeis
University for rescinding its honorary degree invitation to Ayaan
Hirsi Ali over her controversial remarks about Islam. The
Weekly Standard‘s William Kristol, for example, called it
“shameful” and wrote that absent a satisfactory explanation,
Brandeis donors “shouldn’t support an institution that’s displayed
such pathetic cowardice and moral bankruptcy.” The Wall Street
Journal, meanwhile, editorialized that Brandeis’s decision
demonstrated that the Waltham, Massachusetts-based institution’s
core values “now include intolerance and the illiberal suppression
of ideas.” But Ira Stoll takes a different view. Hirsi Ali’s right
to speak was not “suppressed,” Stoll maintains, and Brandeis has
every right to decide what is in its institutional best
interest.

View this article.

• The suspect in the shootings at two Jewish
  community centers in
  Kansas City, Missouri, will be charged with a hate crime. An
  imperial wizard with the
  Ku Klux Klan condemned the killings as an “act of hate.”
• The Washington Post and The Guardian won the
  
  Pulitzer Prize public service medal for reporting on Edward
  Snowden’s National Security Agency disclosures.
• $760 million in unclaimed refunds from the
  Internal Revenue Service will officially become the property of
  the federal government at midnight tomorrow.
• The 35-year sentence for
  Chelsea Manning has been approved by the commander of the Army
  Military District of Washington.
• A Russian warplane “buzzed” the
  USS Donald Cook in the Black Sea in what American military
  officials called a “provocative action.”
• USA Today asks whether tomorrow’s
  blood moon eclipse is a sign of the End Times.

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Remy reworks the Pharrell Williams
hit, “Happy,” for tax season.

“Remy: Happy (Tax Day Edition)” is the latest from Reason TV.
Watch above or click the link below for lyrics, links, downloadable
versions, and more.

View this article.