USA using Patriot Act against its own citizens

Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.

But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.

What is this? What country is this? This is the United States! And now a teenager is a POW to his own country!

The Patriot Act is to protect the public? What a bunch of bull!

What do you think about this situation?

Scary new technology: face recognition

From the Herald Sun:

A MELBOURNE nightclub has installed facial recognition software to stamp out thugs and known troublemakers.

Chasers nightclub in Chapel St, which already has metal detectors to screen patrons for weapons, believes the system is one of the first in the world for nightclubs.

Management now wants the technology to be adopted in other nightclubs to create a security network.

Assaults and violence around nightspots is increasing.

Melbourne’s Lord Mayor Robert Doyle said the technology could help the fight against violence, and should be looked at for venues on their last warnings.

The face-recognition technology was installed at Chasers on the weekend.

It was bought after a chemical bomb was let off in the venue last year.

How freaky is this. Now people can have the power to get the face of all people in a room and store these images to track the people when they come back. And you thought plain old video cameras were an invasion of privacy. Now we get facial recognition features. Eek!

The Truth about Facebook: What is your information used for?

Do you have a Facebook?
Do you use it regularly?
Do you think what happins in Facebook stays in Facebook?
Watch this…

25 things Google knows about you

Here you can read about the 25 things Google knows about you, some of them are suprising.

Some of the scarier ones are:

2. The web pages you visit: Google AdSense is used by many web pages for online advertising, and Google’s cookies record your visits to web pages with their ad program on them.

6. Who and what you’re emailing: GMail users, and those who send mail to GMail users share a variety of personal and business information with Google.

7. What’s on your PC: If you’re using Google Desktop, Google knows everything that you keep on your computer.

13. What you’re watching on YouTube: Google owns YouTube, and knows about all the dirty videos you’ve been watching.

This is a huge privacy violation, but, it’s Google. Google can do anything it wants, right? Well, as long as people still use it, it can. But think about it: do you want all of this stuff out there for Google to collect and store?

Man beaten and tazered by border patrol

This man tried to use his fourth amendment rights when asked if the border patrol could search his car, and ended up being beaten, tazered, and arrested.

This goes against everything America stands for. Freedom, privacy, etc. What a horrible experience. To know you are innocent, have your car windows smashed, and be tazered, then beaten, then arrested.

Microchips…for tracking medicine

Microchips: the small, ‘harmless’ chips that can be implanted in one’s body to track them. Well, now, according to this article, microchips could soon be implanted into pills so doctors can track whether or not their patients are taking their medicine. Hello Big Brother! When it is still being questioned whether all medicine is actually even good for you, now doctors want to make sure you are taking it. And remind you if you are not. This is very invasive into everyone’s private life. This article claims these chips could be “useful for psychiatric or elderly patients who rely on a complicated regime of drugs – and are at risk if they miss a dose or take it at the wrong time.”

Well yes, but the same is true for microchips in people. They might help children and psychiatric patients not get lost. But does that mean they are good? No. In fact, they are the opposite of good. It is one thing to write yourself a note to remember to take your pills. But for your doctor to be ‘peering into your life’ to see if you are taking what he or she prescribed is definitely overstepping boundaries.