Surveillance aircraft used by the U.S. military overseas could soon be coming to the skies above Los Angeles County.

KNX 1070′s Charles Feldman reports the Federal Aviation Administration is making it easier for local law enforcement agencies to fly unmanned drones.

The FAA has streamlined the process that would allow agencies to fly smaller, unarmed versions of the drones that hunt down terrorists in places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has not yet applied for an application to fly drones over our skies, its Homeland Security chief Bob Osborne said drones could be in the department’s future — with some caveats.

CONTINUED at CBS Los Angeles.

Facial recognition is becoming a bigger part of law enforcement and homeland security. It’s also growing in the commercial sector, which has all kinds of privacy and ID misuse implications. That’s why the Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop to explore the issues.

Amanda Koulousias, a staff attorney in the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection at the FTC, spoke to The Federal Drive with Tom Temin Tuesday morning about the who, what and why of this gathering.

“One of the things that we learned at the workshop … is what are the privacy concerns here and are the technologies currently being implemented in a way that raises additional privacy concerns or are they being implemented in a privacy-sensitive way,” said Koulousias. “And since we don’t fully know the answers to that, it’s very hard to predict where we’ll go.”

Workshop participants included technologists, privacy and consumer advocates, academics and representatives of companies implementing facial recognition in their products. They discussed the privacy concerns relating to two separate technologies — facial detection and facial recognition.

One way that companies are now using facial detection is in commercial signs. “It’s detecting the age range and the gender of the person who is looking at the sign,” Koulousias said. “It can then target an ad to that person based on the demographic characteristics.”

Facial recognition, on the other hand, is being used in various photo-tagging applications. Representatives from both Google and Facebook were among those at the workshop discussing how their social networks were using the technology.

“Facial recognition is also one of the things we talked about with possible future uses, which are numerous,” Koulousias said. These include using facial recognition to unlock a cell phone or to detect a consumer’s emotional reaction to an ad.

One of the workshop attendees, Prof. Alesandro Acquisti, spoke about a study he recently conducted to determine if facial recognition technology could be used to identify previously anonymous photos online, such as ones found on dating websites.

For many of the privacy and consumer advocates at the workshop, the main issue was whether consumers were aware of how facial recognition technology was being implemented and what degree of consumer control, if any, is built into these products.

“With facial detection in digital signs, is there a notice to consumers that the digital sign is using a camera that implements facial detection?” Koulousias asked. “Is there a notice if the ads are being targeted based on that?”

Under Section 5 of the FTC Act, the agency has the ability to bring cases if an act is deemed unfair or deceptive. At this point, though, the agency is in an information-gathering mode. “We’re really trying to figure out what’s going on in this space, how it’s being used, where it’s going [and] bring everybody together to discuss these issues,” Koulousias said.

The FTC is soliciting public comments on these technologies through Jan. 31 on its website. “Once we get the responses and see what the responses to our questions are, we will decide where to go from there,” she said.

Source: Federal News Radio.

Lawmakers in Louisiana are calling for National Guard troops to patrol the streets of New Orleans after a toddler was killed in a drive-by shooting. The last time troops were involved in domestic law enforcement in the state, they were used to confiscate legally owned firearms in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Keira Holmes Gordon was caught in the crossfire of two separate groups of men in cars who were targeting another man stood near a B. W. Cooper Housing development on Sunday. The toddler, four days shy of her second birthday, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Citing soaring crime levels, state lawmaker Austin Badon Jr. told CNN he “wants the government to step and help control the violence,” by sending troops to patrol troubled areas, although he admitted that just “a select few people” were responsible for the crimes.

The CNN host makes clear that Badon is just one of several officials calling for National Guard troops.

“I have called on the Governor to bring in the National Guard,” said Badon, asserting that residents were “more comfortable” after seeing the Guard patrol the streets in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina.

“We are at war and when you’re at war, you have to bring in soldiers,” said Badon, describing the situation as “urban warfare,” and complaining about people who own guns.

A spokesman for Governor Bobby Jindal’s office said no request had been made from the mayor to send National Guard troops to patrol the streets.

CONTINUED at Infowars. Written by Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones.

The National Transportation Safety Board recommended a nationwide ban on driver use of personal electronic devices Tuesday, following its investigation into a deadly accident last year in Missouri.

NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman discussed the recommendations during a press conference after a meeting on that accident.

“According to [the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration], more than 3,000 people lost their lives last year in distraction-related accidents,”she said. “It is time for all of us to stand up for safety by turning off electronic devices when driving.”

While the NTSB investigates transportation and pipeline accidents and makes recommendations on safety rules and regulations, it has no power to implement them.

The NTSB’s recommendations urge all 50 states and the District ”to ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task).” According to theGovernors Highway Safety Association, 35 states, including Maryland and Virginia, and the District ban texting while driving.

The NTSB has been investigating a deadly crash in Gray Summit, Missouri last year. A 19-year-old pickup driver sent 11 texts in the 11 minutes before before the accident, according to the NTSB, including one “right before impact.” The accident killed two people and injured 38.

“We will never know whether the driver was typing, reaching for the phone, or reading a text when his pickup ran into the truck in front of him without warning,”Herman said in her opening statement.

“But, we do know he had been distracted — cognitively, manually, and visually — while driving.

“Driving was not his only priority.”

CONTINUED at the Washington Post.

*Taken from Geekologie.

Everybody have a good Thanksgiving weekend? Excellent. I did nothing but play video games, eat, drink and sleep. It was pretty much my dream world. Plus twice I got so full I thought I was gonna die. First World problems, amirite?! South Korea is testing a fleet of robotic guards to patrol their prison facilities. I’m gonna tear off one of their antennas and make a knife.

It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide.

Prof Lee Baik-Chu, of Kyonggi University, who led the design process, said the robots would alert human guards if they discovered a problem.

CONTINUED..

*Written by Rob Rimes.

1. Introduction:

Not too long ago, I had no idea who the hell Governor Jerry Brown was, other than being a lyrical flourish in the Dead Kennedys’ epic song “California Über Alles”. And shit, that song was released in 1979 which just goes to show just how long this tyrannical cockpuppet has been on the political scene. The song claimed back then that he was going to be president, well that hasn’t happened yet. Truth is, he is a career politician for sure and he even had presidential runs in ’76, ’80 and ’92. He is more than just the current Governor of Cali, in fact, he was their governor once before for two terms that stretched from 1975-1983. I guess the Golden Staters love this shitpickle maroonish tyrant because they elected him as governor once again, 27 years after he left that position. Well, there is that old adage that states, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”

Governor Jerry Brown is a tyrant, plain and fucking simple. A part of me fears that this bastard will one day run for president again, maybe in 2016 or 2020. God I fucking hope not because his current tenure as Cali Governor has been full of several attacks on liberty and this fucksack hasn’t even been in office a whole year yet! If anything, this article is being written to lay out the tyrannies he’s committed already, in less than a quarter of a single term. By exposing all this, you will hopefully be deterred from ever giving this guy your vote, whether it is for an unprecedented fourth term as governor or a potential presidential run.

2. Eliminating Parental Rights:

One of the biggest things this tyrant has done, is he has made it so that California preteens can choose whether or not they want the Gardasil vaccine, without their parents’ knowledge. The vaccine supposedly helps prevent certain types of HPV. However, this is the same vaccine that has gotten presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry into a lot of trouble with a big portion of the voter base. Reason being, the vaccination has received a lot of scrutiny due to the fact that it has been proven to cause harm and in some cases death to individuals who have taken it. Some research even states that the vaccine is ineffective and some studies have concluded that HPV doesn’t cause cancer but Gardasil itself does. You can do your own research on it and decide if the pros outweigh the cons but really, should the decision of partaking in such a controversial medical procedure fall on the shoulders of a 12-year-old child?

The point is, Jerry Brown has eliminated parental rights. I’m sorry but that is just fucking scary. I’m not saying all parents are even good, most parents these days seem pretty shitty. However, an adult is more capable of making these sorts of decisions, especially for their own children. It kind of falls under the same category as abortions in certain states where the child doesn’t have to get parental permission. While I understand that teenagers don’t want their parents knowing that they are sexually active, I still think that until a person is 18-years-old (or emancipated from their parents) that they still have to live under the rule of their parents or legal guardians. That might not seem very libertarian of me but a 12-year-old girl shouldn’t even be in a position to have to make this decision and live with the consequences of her possibly naive choice.

So by giving children the responsibility of adults, is the nanny state now assuming that they can also buy beer, cigarettes and drive cars? Hell, maybe they can work in strip clubs or even prostitute themselves out in areas where hooking is legal. I know these are extreme examples but aren’t the actions of Jerry Brown here extreme? I mean, you basically consider 12-year-old girls to be adults in this case but in other cases they are still children? You can’t have your cake and eat it too. This is just another case of forcing us all to comply with the statist quo.

Fact is, the nanny state has been trying to pry children away from their parents for years. This case is no different. The state is letting you know that they are the parents and that you just have to offer your child, now their child, free room and board until they are old enough to go out and live off of the system, as they are being indoctrinated to do already. Don’t trust mommy and daddy, trust the state kiddos. Oh, and while your at it, be sure to snitch to the state about any suspicious activity your parents may be a part of.

The hypocrisy of this is that the state has laws in place to protect children from sexual predators because the state obviously feels that children can’t make well-informed decisions when it comes to sexual activity due to their undeveloped worldview. Yet they are informed enough to decide on whether or not they can get vaccinated before they commence in sexual activity? It’s fucking horseshit! As real as it can be stated, Jerry Brown condones the exploitation of the children in his own state, which he is sworn to protect. Is he getting kickbacks from Merck like Rick Perry did?

And while young girls are now able to make this crazy decision, Jerry Brown has banned minors from going to tanning salons. Truth is, there is no logic behind any of this hypocritical behavior unless you understand the real agenda here. That agenda is that the state is grooming these children to be zombies reliant on the state itself. Unfortunately the people of California haven’t woken up enough to lambast this bastard. Chances are, he’ll get voted in for a fourth term.

Ultimately, as with everything, this is a state issue as this country has been founded on states’ rights. However, California is apparently full of subservient dumbasses that are seemingly fine with this. Well, I’m not cool with it and if I ever do have a child, they won’t be raised in Killa Cali.

Before I move on, here is something Jerry Brown said recently after vetoing a bill that would have forced minors to wear ski helmets:

I believe parents have the ability and responsibility to make good choices for their children.

What a dickbag.

3. Warrantless Searches & Seizures:

Governor Jerry Brown is one of the biggest pro-police state politicians I have seen in recent memory. Recently, he used his executive power to veto a bill, which has resulted in allowing law enforcement in California to be able to do warrantless on-the-spot cell phone searches. This is a direct attack to the Constitution, more specifically the 4th Amendment, which states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Well, Jerry Brown doesn’t give a fuck about all that noise. You see, now residents of the Golden State who are either suspects to a crime or just simply pulled over on a traffic stop can be forced to hand their mobile device over to the police, who have the power to search it inside and out. In the digital age this means that cops have access to all your private e-mails, pictures, text messages, contacts, call records, cloud-storage services, location-based services, banking activity and everything else you could imagine. I don’t know about you but I have a lot of idiot friends that text me idiot things that could pretty much incriminate me if the cop wanted to be a humorless dick. Many cops are humorless dicks.

This gives police way too much power. Not only that but it strips 37 million people of their constitutional rights. The 4th Amendment exists to stop the abuse of power from the state and to protect the individual and property rights of the American citizen. What Jerry Brown has done here is unacceptable. This isn’t even an issue of states’ rights, it’s an issue of some vile fucksack coming along and taking a huge shit on our nation’s most sacred document. It is a slap in the face of our Founding Fathers and the millions of Golden Staters that are forced to live under this dark cloud of tyranny. Then again, I guess you get what you vote for.

As is always the way with government, what is to stop them from going a mile when you give them an inch? What is going to stop the corruption of crooked cops from finding just enough suspicion to stop you and thumb through your smartphone on a whim? What’s to stop them from finding just enough incriminating evidence to make your life a living hell? You better not back talk them! Hell, you might as well give them the keys to your entire kingdom because they can just peer inside whenever they want anyway.

If Brown is willing to bring forth this sort of tyranny, what is to stop him from eventually expanding this policy to allow for cops to search your home or your car without a warrant? We’re on a slippery slope of statist bullshit and if you can’t see the correlation between warrantless searches and seizures of your phone and warrantless searches and seizures of your other property, then you deserve to live under the iron fist.

4. Illegal Immigration Education:

Governor Jerry Brown made another Rick Perry-esque faux pas, in the eyes of many, when he signed the DREAM Act, thus giving a free college education, paid for by the state a.k.a. your tax dollars, to illegal immigrants in California. Hasn’t this punkass bitch learned from all the heat Rick Perry has caught in the Republican debates as of late? Oh wait, I forgot, Perry is basically a liberal in a conservative suit and Brown is a Democrat, so they are pretty much policy butt buddies and chips off of that old leftist block. I mean, Perry actually was a Democrat once but whatever, this isn’t an article about that jackturd (I already wrote one about him here). Point being, why would Jerry Brown worry about what criticism Rick Perry’s not-so-conservative policies generate in conservatives when his own policies come from a contrasting ideology? Besides, is the DREAM Act as bad as conservatives make it out to be?

Well, the DREAM Act essentially promotes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants but it does so at the expense of the tax payer, whether they want to contribute to the program or not. That is tyrannical in my eyes but that just brings up the whole debate about taxation being theft and I don’t want to go there in this article.

You see, the DREAM Act gives illegal immigrants financial assistance for college. While the economy in California is an shambles, this program will cost the state $14.5 million. Now I am all for promoting a path to citizenship and so are many conservatives, or so they claim when under fire, but is this a wise way to do it? Considering that the DREAM Act isn’t just freely given away and that students have to show that they’ve got a solid GPA and intend to use this opportunity to enrich themselves and thus make our country as a whole more prosperous, I can’t really knock it too hard.

Then again, when really looking at it, why does the government need to dangle this carrot in front of illegal immigrants that actually want to become legal immigrants? Why not just make the path easier, regardless of this bullshit stipulation? Is it because the government perceives a college education as a key element to allowing someone the same rights that those of us born here have? With that logic, should I be stripped of my citizenship because I quit college? It doesn’t really make a lot of sense and it just seems like a type of social engineering.

If someone wants to take the path to citizenship on their own and they make a conscious effort, why do we want to deny them that? Why make it hard on the person that wants to earn a buck and live legally within the system? Sure, we don’t want to have a bunch of new citizens milking the welfare system and getting caught in that web of bullshit but truth is, illegal immigrants already receive several forms of welfare in this country and since they aren’t documented, the chances of them taking advantage of the system is even greater.

Now this sort of contradicts what I wrote about in “Conservatives & Aliens” but since writing that, I’ve read a lot more on the subject and have come to understand how the illegal immigrant can milk the system more than the legal one. The real problem is the welfare state. Abolish it, make the path to citizenship easier and let the chips fall where they may. By giving immigrants these freebies, we are keeping them weak and dependent. Then again, that’s probably just part of a bigger agenda.

5. Open Carry Gun Rights:

Recently, Governor Jerry Brown took a shit on the 2nd Amendment when he banned open carry of guns in the state of California. To many gun hating lefties, this is a pretty solid victory for their ilk but to the rest of us, it is just another display of utter tyranny and an attack against the Constitution.

The problem with banning open carry in California is quite unique, as its strange gun laws make it so that getting even a concealed-carry weapons permit is much more difficult. You see, in Cali, unlike other states, a CCW must be approved or denied by the sole discretion of that county’s sheriff. So if the sheriff doesn’t like you, guess what? No CCW. In other states, anyone can get a CCW as long as they pass a background check and a skills test. It is a pretty simple process and helps prevent any police state or nanny state shenanigans. California is just a fucked up ass backwards place however and many of their laws are just borderline silly, especially this one.

This is a classic example of government control by overreaching their authority and thus taking it to the people. It is the 2nd Amendment that gives people the power to defend all their other constitutional rights. This is probably one of the reasons why progressive liberals are always trying to ban guns. Then again, they also just prescribe to the media-hyped fear about gun violence without looking at the real facts. The fact is, to steal an old adage, an armed society is a polite society. You never hear about gun violence at a gun show, do you? With their logic, a gun show should be a fucking war zone. I’ve covered all this in “Gun Control (is) for Dummies“.

6. The Amazon Tax:

Business is good! Well, not in California for Amazon. You see, they had their business stifled by Jerry Brown’s special Internet sales tax law. The shitty law caused Amazon to basically say “fuck it” and leave the Golden State. In another case of the know-it-all statists trying to milk every penny from every source possible, the unintended consequences of these good intention became very apparent, very quickly when Amazon refused to play the bullshit game.

This law didn’t just attack Amazon, it made it so that all out-of-state online retailers that did business in California had to collect sales tax from Cali customers. This was done to “create jobs” and help “mom & pop” compete with the Internet retail monsters. Yep, government intervention always works. Nope, nothing’s going to go south here!

Did Governor Jerry Brown think about the jobs he would effect by pushing these giant companies away? When I buy used books, DVDs, video games or CDs from Amazon, about half of the items come from “mom & pop” stores in California. Cali has a lot of small stores that benefit from the opportunity Amazon gives them to have storefronts on their supersite. Jerry must have a very small worldview and is unable to see how the last true frontier, the Internet, hugely benefits all of us. Damn you prosperity!

The San Francisco Times, which supports this stupid tax, actually printed this laughable sentence:

Finally, because it will be collecting California sales tax one year from now, the door is now open for Amazon to open a distribution center or warehouse in the country’s most populous state.

Do these fucking idiots really believe that? Funny, because Amazon quit doing business with Cali completely! Did Gov. Brown think this would incentivize Amazon and other large megacompanies to move to his state? Dude must have a fat sack of some O.G. kush cause he’s high as fuck!

So is Amazon still on the outs with Killa Cali? Nope, a deal was made. Well, at least for now.

After Amazon announced that they were leaving Cali, the state panicked like little bitches. California gave Amazon a one-year reprieve from having to comply with this stupid sales tax collection law. Amazon, in return, cannot seek a ballot measure campaign to undo the tax during this reprieve. This pissed off the Democrats of the state who were desperate to raise revenue by any means necessary; their feeble minds always turn to this sort of policy which fails time and time again. Either way, this situation is still a mess and it is anyone’s guess how it will pan out a year or so from now.

7. Conclusion:

Governor Jerry Brown is a statist shitcock that has no concern about liberty and freedom but after reading this, you should now be well aware of that. The problem is, people really really like this guy. He’s charismatic, he’s been around forever and he just knows how to work those Cali peeps like no one else. After eight years of that Terminator guy, who pretty much ran the state into the ground, Californians probably just wanted to see a friendly face. Frankly, I don’t blame them.

The problem is, Jerry Brown is not the answer that California needs. He is a career politician and an establishment heavyweight that has a statist agenda that is going to dig Cali’s financial pit deeper while pushing his state further and further towards an authoritarian model. The only two political parties in California will be the Police State Party and the Nanny State Party. At the end of the day, I hope this guy is perfectly content with where he is at in life now because another run at the White House would be scary. Just stay in Cali dude because it’s pretty far away from me.

*Taken from the Daily Caller.

According to the Anonymous “IberoAmerica” Blog and former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, the hacker organization’s plan — to release a list of collaborators with the bloody drug cartel Los Zetas — is back on.

Doubts about the project, dubbed #OpCartel, swirled amid concerns that the operation could result in reprisals from the violent drug gangs. The Guardian reported two members of the operation have said Anonymous is putting the brakes on their whistleblowing scheme due to concerns that people could be killed as a result.

Hackers planned the operation in response to the alleged Mexico City kidnapping of a member of Anonymous, only one of several incidents of the Zetas targeting tech-savvy information activists. In September, two bloggers who denounced the cartel on various social media were disemboweled and hung from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, with a chilling note from the Zetas warning against further online criticism.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from USA Today. Video at link.

Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Innand other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels.

During the PSA, which starts with a woman exiting a yellow taxi in front of a train station, a narrator says, “Maybe you see something suspicious. Can you be sure? If you see something, say something to authorities.”

The PSA, which will be interspersed with other messages on the welcome screen, will be the same in all 5,400 hotels that LodgeNet serves. It ends by telling viewers to contact “local authorities.”

CONTINUED..