Going through the Roof

Mark 2:1-6

Look at their Compassion
There cared enough to go out of their way, to take of their time, to look
beyond themselves, to put themselves out. To bring a man that could
not bring himself he could not do it. The did it. Compassion has to start
first in the heart then in the home, then the hearer can see it.

Look at their Corporation
They worked together, they did not criticize each other. They were a team
with a purpose.

Look at the Cripple
He was helpless, dependant on others. Like the lost world that does
not know Christ. They need someone to care enough, even though
they don't know it.

Look at their Creativity
They found another way. They found a way that was different then
the worlds. In the end it was successful. They might have done it the
way you would have done it, but it work.


Don't Look at the Criticism
They cared for their friends healing (his soul). They did not listen to
people tell them it could not be done, or they were doing it wrong.
They just did it.







On the weekends will be mostly filled up with articles i have found and kind of go together, hopefully they will fit together. Of course this is not the most radical articles i come across, but maybe it will help you see and search for yourself. I have a friend that when he teaches the Bible he says that "all I can do is open a door for you, then you have to decide to go through it." that is kind of how i see what i'm going to try to do here, is open the door, give you ideas, articles and
trends. What you do with it, is up to you.




Ok today we are going to give you a few articles that are going to cover the Government and it's prying eyes. The Government would not be doing it's job if it did not spy. But it does not have to do it to it's citizens (subjects). These are things you should know about. Not because you can do a lot about it, but so that you are not ignorant.




Congress wants to know your eBay buying habits




'Honey pot of private data would include Social Security numbers' A freedom-focused grassroots organization has issued a nationwide alert about a plan in Congress that would require credit card companies, eBay, Amazon, Google and other companies to report what you buy to the federal government. FreedomWorks chairman Dick Army said the privacy implications are "breathtaking." "This is a provision with astonishing reach, and it was slipped into the bill just this week," he said. "Not only does it affect nearly every credit card transaction in America, such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express, but the bill specifically targets payment systems like eBay's PayPal, Amazon and Google Checkout," he said. FreedomWorks said the provision is "hidden deep in Sen. Christopher Dodd's 630-page Senate housing legislation." It was added by the bill's managers without debate and calls for a tracking and reporting system "on nearly every electronic transaction." "Privacy groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology and small business organizations like the NFIB sharply criticized this idea when it first appeared earlier this year," the FreedomWorks statement said. "What is the federal government's purpose with this kind of detailed data? How will this database be secured, and who will have access? Many small proprietors use their Social Security number as their tax ID. How will their privacy be protected? What compliance costs will this impose on businesses? Why is Sen. Chris Dodd putting this provision in a housing bailout bill? The bill also includes the creation of a new national fingerprint registry for mortgage brokers." The bill's summary, FreedomWorks said, states: Payment Card and Third Party Network Information Reporting. The proposal requires information reporting on payment card and third party network transactions. Payment settlement entities, including merchant acquiring banks and third party settlement organizations, or third party payment facilitators acting on their behalf, will be required to report the annual gross amount of reportable transactions to the IRS and to the participating payee. Reportable transactions include any payment card transaction and any third party network transaction. Participating payees include persons who accept a payment card as payment and third party networks who accept payment from a third party settlement organization in settlement of transactions. "At a time when concerns about both identity theft and government spying are paramount, Congress wants to create a new honey pot of private data that includes Social Security numbers. This bill reduces privacy across America's payment processing systems and treats every American small business or eBay power seller like a criminal on parole by requiring an unprecedented level of reporting to the federal government. This outrageous idea is another reason to delay the housing bailout legislation so that Senators and the public at large have time to examine its full implications," FreedomWorks said. FreedomWorks is chaired by Armey, the former U.S. House Majority leader, and pursues lower taxes, less government and more freedom by coordinating the work of thousands of grassroots volunteers. The activist organization is urging Americans to contact their congressmen and object to the plan.


http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=25441











Comcast Cameras to Start Watching You?




If you have some tinfoil handy, now might be a good time to fashion a hat. At the Digital Living Room conference today, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room. The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads. Yikes. Kunkel said the system wouldn’t be based on facial recognition, so there wouldn’t be a picture of you on file (we hope). Instead, it would distinguish between different members of your household by recognizing body forms. He stressed that the system is still in the experimental phase, that there hasn’t been consumer testing, and that any rollout “must add value” to the viewing experience beyond serving ads. Perhaps I’ve seen Enemy of the State too many times, or perhaps I’m just naive about the depths to which Comcast currently tracks my every move. I can’t trust Comcast with BitTorrent, so why should I trust them with my must-be-kept-secret, DVR-clogging addiction to Keeping Up with the Kardashians? Kunkel also spoke on camera with me about fixing bad Comcast user experiences, the ongoing BitTorrent battle and VOD. But he mostly towed the corporate line on these issues (the monitoring your living room came up after my camera was put away). Maybe this is why they want to go digital a better two-way signal still I don't like the idea of this kinda tech in my home in any case looks like it's time to poke big brother in his one eye and dump Comcast.




http://newteevee.com/2008/03/18/comc...-watching-you/





Phone companies being given right to spy on you




Commentary: Fearful Democrats cave on constitutional protections By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch




Pretty soon, we won't have any more freedoms for them to hate. Scratch the Fourth Amendment off the list of freedoms that we thought we had. Read the Fourth Amendment. Pressured by a huge lobbying effort by Big Telecom and by fears of being painted as weak on terrorism, the Democratic-controlled Senate has rolled over on your right to privacy, abandoning legislation that would enforce the constitutional requirements of probable cause and due process of law before the phone companies can help the government spy on you by turning over your phone records, emails and other sensitive information. Instead, the bill now moving toward passage would give the phone companies broad legal immunity when they collect and turn over any information on you that the government says it needs. No warrant needed. No questions asked. On Tuesday, the Senate, with the backing of 18 Democrats and every Republican, defeated attempts by Sens. Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold to hold the telecom companies accountable for their past illegal conduct. Sen. Barack Obama voted for your freedom. Sen. John McCain voted against you. Sen. Hillary Clinton didn't vote but is opposed to immunity, a spokesman said. Immunity for telecoms The only hope for your freedom to be secure against "unreasonable searches" now rests in the hands of the House, which passed a wiretapping bill that does not give the telecom companies amnesty. Bush has promised to veto the wiretapping bill if it does not include the telecom amnesty provision, even though he has said the bill is essential to keep America safe. You might think the veto threat means the president values the telecom companies' profits more than he values your life, but really he values his own skin. Giving immunity for the telecoms means that Bush and his administration will never be held legally accountable for their crimes because the truth will never come out. The Bush administration and the Republican leadership have lied consistently about the secret domestic spy program that bypasses the special court that was set up in the 1970s in response to the nation's outrage about the government spying on American citizens without a judicial order. They say it's all about listening in when Al Qaeda calls, but the secret program appears to go far beyond that admirable goal. During the debate on the wiretapping bill, the Republicans said the government wasn't able to save the lives of some American contractors in Iraq because the legal niceties took too long. But the lives were actually lost because the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department bungled the case, not because Congress had tied their hands. Domestic spy program still murky It's perfectly legal (under current U.S. law) for the U.S. government to spy on terrorists in Iraq. What the Constitution forbids is unreasonable searches of American citizens inside the United States, which apparently have gone on unfettered for the past seven years. The U.S. domestic spy program expanded by the Bush administration remains murky. What few details are known are troubling, because they suggest that the government has the ability and the will to collect massive amounts of information about ordinary citizens in real time, with the enthusiastic support of the major telecommunications companies seeking lucrative government contracts and without any check by the courts. While the administration says the 9/11 attacks made such spying necessary, the White House began expanding its domestic spying program well before September 2001, according to court documents filed by Joseph Nacchio, the former head of Qwest who claims his refusal to violate the law and turn over private information to the government led to the denial of a big government contract for his company and to his subsequent conviction on insider trading. The phone companies, including AT&T and Verizon Communications that did go along with the spying are being sued by privacy advocates. Current law specifically prohibits the phone companies from turning over private information to the government without due process. One judge has already ruled against the phone companies. In their defense, the phone companies say they were just being patriotic and that anything they did was requested by the Justice Department. But just in case their legal argument fails, the companies have spent millions lobbying to get the law changed retroactively. The bill now being rushed through a complacent Senate would kill those lawsuits by giving the phone companies blanket immunity for past and future transgressions. No questions asked. Because the Congress has refused to investigate the secret spying program (even in a secret session), the private lawsuits are the only way the truth about the spying program will ever be known. Giving amnesty to the telecoms effectively gives amnesty to Bush and other officials who ordered the spying. If spying on Americans is justified, the administration should be forced by Congress or the courts to prove it. Neither the telecoms nor the administration has proven that. Those who support ripping up the Constitution often say that if you don't have anything to hide, warrantless spying shouldn't bother you. The same standard should apply to the phone companies. If they don't have anything to hide, then why do they need immunity? Why shouldn't Congress, the courts and the people know the full extent of the spying and its legal justification?




http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/phone-companies-being-given-right/story.aspx?guid=%7B2E6EAFA5-54C8-4860-839B-6CE57B7393DB%7D







Homeland Security Wants Total Control of Internet




by DAILY KOS



Slashdot and Cryptome report that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is demanding the master key for the DNS root zone - a demand that has other nations alarmed. With the master key, DHS would have control over the Internet, as Slashdot describes, quoting an "anonymous reader."The key will play an important role in the new DNSSec security extension, because it will make spoofing IP-addresses impossible. By forcing the IANA [Internet Assigned Numbers Authority] to hand out a copy of the master key, the US government will be the only institution that is able to spoof IP addresses and be able to break into computers connected to the Internet without much effort.The issue arose at Friday's meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Lisbon, Portugal.Deep Harm's diary :: ::There is no indication yet that U.S. mainstream news media have reported on the DHS proposal. U.S. coverage of the ICANN meeting focused (predictably) on a proposal to create a domain specifically for adult websites.Cryptome cites a German news source, Heisse Online, which provides the following information.The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)...wants to have the key to sign the DNS root zone solidly in the hands of the US government. This ultimate master key would then allow authorities to track DNS Security Extensions (DNSSec) all the way back to the servers that represent the name system's root zone on the Internet. The "key-signing key" signs the zone key, which is held by VeriSign. At the meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Lisbon, Bernard Turcotte, president of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) drew everyone's attention to this proposal as a representative of the national top-level domain registries (ccTLDs).At the ICANN meeting, Turcotte said that the managers of country registries were concerned about this proposal. When contacted by heise online, Turcotte said that the national registries had informed their governmental representatives about the DHS's plans. A representative of the EU Commission said that the matter is being discussed with EU member states. DNSSec is seen as a necessary measure to keep the growing number of manipulations on the net under control. The DHS is itself sponsoring a campaign to support the implementation of DNSSec. Three of the 13 operators currently work outside of the US, two of them in Europe. Lars-Johan Liman of the Swedish firm Autonomica, which operates the I root server, pointed out the possible political implications last year. Liman himself nominated ICANN as a possible candidate for the supervisory function.When other nations are worried, Americans, too, should be concerned. The Bush administration has demonstrated that it is unable to wield power responsibly. Therefore, its demand for Internet control should be viewed as an opportunity to abuse its authority to control a medium that has played a critical role in holding it accountable.




ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED




http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/87655


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/31/1828/16663/





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