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According to Oliver, Pew Research found that 46 percent of Americans say they don’t care about government surveillance. Why? It’s too complicated and technical to try to trace the life cycle of a text message. Hilariously Oliver tries to put the issue into terms Americans will care about — whether or not the government has access to your naked pictures. Once everyday folks heard the argument in those terms, they got interested in the debate pretty fast. |
“I did this [released secret NSA spying information] to give the American people the chance to decide for themselves what kind of government they want to have,” Snowden tells Oliver. |
Do you want a government that hoards your most scandalous communications? |
2. Why did the government lie about its spying activity? |
On June 1, 2015, key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire, including the controversial Section 215 provision, which has been interpreted by a FISA Court to mean that the government has the authority to collect comprehensive data on its citizens. |
Prior to the Snowden revelations about programs like PRISM, American government officials — including President Obama — said the government was collecting only basic phone and internet records, like when a call was made and to whom (metadata), rather than the actual content of the conversation. Snowden proved that’s just not true. |
The Snowden documents showed that the government was collecting and storing the content of Americans’ communications too, like emails, phone calls, internet searches and text and chat messages, rather than just basic call record information. |
Worse yet, it’s not just being looked at; it’s being stored in monster government data centers in Utah, in case it needs to be looked at in the future. So if you want to play a semantics game, they aren’t actively looking at it, just saving a copy in case they need to later. Does that make you feel any better about it? |
3. Can you trust the government with this kind of power? |
Mobile phone data provides an incredibly detailed account of your life — your location, who you call, emails, text messages, internet searches, online shopping habits. Combine that level of detailed data contained in your credit card records, home and work emails and internet searches, and that’s a pretty freaky accurate representation of who you are, where you’ve been, with whom and what you were doing. But not totally accurate. |
Your phone data might put you in a mall food court at the same time as a terrorist, but does that mean you’re a terrorist too? What if you just both happen to love Orange Julius and soft pretzels? |
Now, imagine in the future the government charges you with a crime. Any crime, really. Doesn’t matter which. For belonging to the wrong religion. For being too friendly with someone the government doesn’t like. Happens all the time around the world. Rather than the government having to collect evidence about your crime to prove your guilt, it’ll already have a pile of information on you it can use however it chooses. No warrant. Nada. |
We might be cool with all of this surveillance capability being used against the terrorists, but what if it’s turned on Americans one day? |
So do you trust them? |
4. How do we balance privacy and safety? |
The Patriot Act was conceived amidst the fear following the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. But even one of the primary authors of the Patriot Act, Wisconsin Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, testified that the legislation was never intended to authorize the bulk collection and storage of the communications of U.S. citizens and that its powers should be reined in when the Patriot Act is reauthorized this summer. |
Government officials argue that this kind of surveillance is critical for fighting terrorists and those who would do America and Americans harm. That sounds totally reasonable and fair. But with programs like PRISM and other surveillance activity Americans have no idea is going on, how can we have a debate and balance the idea of security against the idea of liberty? |
How much privacy are we willing to give up for less security risk? |
5. Are you on a watch list? |
At the end of the interview, Snowden gives John Oliver a pretty ominous warning — that by interviewing him, Oliver is likely now on a very serious, very scary U.S. government watch list. The idea of a watch list is discussed in more frightening detail in the Academy Award-winning documentary about Snowden, Citizenfour. |
Americans are put on watch lists all the time, which brings increased scrutiny of communications, increased surveillance and, when traveling out of the country, often problems getting your passport cleared across international borders without intense questioning. But how do you know if you’ve done something to raise the government’s suspicions about your activity? Am I on a watch list just for writing this article? Are you for reading it? How would we know? It’s a secret. |
The principles of transparency and checks and balances the U.S. government is founded on demand that citizens be informed about these kinds of government activities. Whether you view Snowden as a hero or a traitor, as he says, now you know what your government is doing in our name. Do you care? Does it bother you? We should be allowed to have this debate and make an informed decision one way or the other. |
In the meantime, John Oliver and his team of brillant writers have distilled the argument down to this: Do you want the government to have a picture of you naked? |
DAVENPORT - Don Skipper, an administrative assistant at Ridge Community High School, was named the school's head boys basketball coach Wednesday. |
Skipper has served as an assistant basketball coach the last two years for the Bolts and had stints as a head coach at McKeel Academy and All Saints' Academy, and was named Coach of the Year three times by the Coaches Association of Polk County, according to a press release from the school. |
BABSON PARK - Webber International University will host the 2007 NAIA Region 14 softball tournament today and Friday at the Diamond Plex in Winter Haven. |
The opening ceremony will take place at 4:30 p.m., with Webber playing Thomas University (Georgia) on Field A at 5 p.m. |
The tournament will continue at noon Friday with the elimination games. |
Admission for the tournament is $5 per day or $8 for a two-day pass. |
The tournament champions will receive an automatic place in the NAIA National Tournament to be held in Decatur, Ala, May 18-23. |
For details, go to and view the softball page or call 863-638-2980. |
LAKE WALES - The 13th annual Lake Wales Football golf tournament will be June 2 at the Lake Wales Country Club. |
The tournament will start at 8 a.m. The cost will be $75 and play will be in scramble format. |
Cost includes lunch and door prizes. Hole sponsors, prize donations and auction items are needed. Major sponsors are also available for $500. |
For details, call Rod Shafer at 863-678-4222 or 863-604-3304. |
BALTIMORE - Aubrey Huff homered with one out in the 10th inning against his former team, giving the Baltimore Orioles a 1-0 victory over the Tampa Bay Devil Rays on Wednesday night. |
After James Shields pitched nine brilliant innings for Tampa Bay, Brian Stokes (1-4) faced only two batters before giving up the game's lone run. Ramon Hernandez hit a fly to center before Huff drove a 1-1 pitch over the wall in center, his fourth homer of the season and second against the Devil Rays. |
Huff played for five seasons in Tampa Bay and briefly with Houston last year before signing with Baltimore as a free agent in January. |
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx is the latest Linux operating system from Canonical, aimed at consumers. It's free, but is it sufficiently consumer friendly that you should switch from Windows? |
Dell offers Ubuntu Netbook Remix as an option pre-installed for its Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook. But how well does UNR fare on other netbooks? |
There's never been a better time to give Linux a try on your PC. Here's why. |
Is this the easiest way to try Linux on a Win7 laptop? |
Still image of Lisa Sharon Harper from YouTube. |
Pastors and lay leaders who represent minority and multiethnic communities and are appalled by the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency have a blunt message for the white evangelical majority that helped elect him: we’re disappointed in you, but not surprised. |
For these evangelicals of color, Trump’s use of racially-charged language, his anti-immigrant rhetoric, negative remarks targeting Mexicans and Muslims, as well as the emergence of the “Access Hollywood” tape and his other divisive comments about women, were simply disqualifying. |
While some prominent white evangelical leaders made their opposition to then-candidate Trump widely known (many signing a letter protesting his candidacy), the majority of white self-identified evangelicals (estimated to run as high as 81 percent), lined up behind him. |
“Many of [Trump’s] critics fell silent or fell into line, while the group known as the ‘religious right’ continued to support him’ says Kathy Khang, a Christian writer and speaker based in the Chicago area. |
For the past eight years, people of color, the LGBT community, and women have been given license to flourish, says Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right and chief church engagement officer at Sojourners. “The white church demonstrated on November 8th that it is more white than Christian, and has a [greater] commitment to white supremacy than it does to Christ,” says Harper. |
The fact that so many evangelicals didn’t see Trump’s controversial rhetoric as derogatory underlined the presence of a persistent and troubling racial divide in American Christianity that these leaders say is deeply rooted in American history. |
Some are questioning the value of continued association with the white evangelical majority. |
Despite their dismay over the prospect of a Trump presidency, those I spoke to appear to be more motivated and energized than daunted by the challenges that lie ahead. |
“This has been a wakeup call to the progressive, moderate community that we have to stand up for what we believe in and communicate it in the public square,” DuBois concludes. |
And Lisa Sharon Harper tells me that “a new Civil Rights movement is happening, and its locus is in people of color.” She sees evidence of it already in the “movement for black lives,” the witness of the so-called “Dreamers” (undocumented immigrants who arrived here as children), and the rising call for solidarity with the poor that mirrors the words of Jesus in Matthew 25. “Every word of Scripture was written by oppressed people,” she says. |
Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans is a Pennsylvania-based freelance writer, and a religion columnist for LNP Media, Inc in Lancaster, PA. Her work has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the National Catholic Reporter, the Global Sisters Report, Religion News Service and other media outlets. |
New York’s bike share really does attract way more commuters than tourists. |
Since its debut last year, New York City’s bike share system, Citi Bike, has been wildly popular. In its first six months of operation, the bright blue bikes logged more than 5 million trips. The system has nearly 100,000 annual members. Yet Citi Bike–which unlike most bike shares in major cities, isn’t subsidized by public funds–is losing money. One of the main reasons is that while annual memberships are popular, the much more profitable day passes aren’t. It’s a phenomenon easily seen in this visualization of two days of Citi Bike rides around New York City. |
Designer Jeff Ferzoco, Sarah Kaufman at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation and Juan Francisco Saldarriaga of Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab worked together to visualize Citi Bike journey data from September 17 and 18 of last year. Over those two days, when the weather was in the 60s and there was no rain, Citi Bike saw 75,000 rides. Rides are separated by type of membership, either annual (blue) or casual (yellow). |
The visualization doesn’t show exact routes along the city’s grid, but instead approximates trips by tracing straight lines between the endpoints. Ridership picks up early in the morning, around 5:30 a.m., and is heavy between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. Almost all of those riders are annual members. Yellow dots are barely visible on the map, except a few around the very lower tip of Manhattan and up near Central Park. As the day wears on, there’s a slight increase in casual members–people riding over the Brooklyn Bridge, for instance–but for the most part, the vast majority of the map is the blue. During the evening rush hours, when commuters get back on a Citi Bike to go home, the map is overwhelmed by a dense network of blue. |
Interestingly, more riders seem to take Citi Bike during the evening hours than take it to work. The number of active riders hits 800 at 8:30 a.m., but spikes to more than 1,000 at 6 p.m. |
Though the balance of ridership clearly tips in favor of annual membership, it would be interesting to compare this data to a weekend. Perhaps more people are willing to grab a daily pass on a Saturday than during the workweek. |
It’s amazing what a difference time can make in the way we perceive certain technologies. A few years ago, the idea of the cloud was terrifying to many people. What exactly did it mean to have something “in the cloud”? Was your personal information just floating around somewhere, ready for people to steal? Now, a lot of those hesitations have disappeared as people learned more about the cloud and its benefits. Businesses and individuals are more than willing to stick their information “in the cloud,” but it’s really not that simple. |
Sure, there are plenty of cloud providers in the market, but choosing the right one for your organization can be a tricky process. Brand name cloud providers are often seen as a reliable option for companies, but the truth is that they may not be the right option for your small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) needs. |
Migrating successfully to the cloud requires a SMB to have the right partner by its side, especially if it lacks cloud expertise or the time to develop an appropriate migration strategy. The right partner will be able to ensure that a SMB’s cloud deployment meets regulatory requirements, offers future scalability and flexibility, and/or provides it with the most cost-effective option possible. |
Again, finding a cloud provider that can do all of the above should be easy, but that’s not always the case. A lot of cloud providers are focused on helping enterprises rather than SMBs. Luckily, there are some cloud providers that cater specifically to SMB customers. |
If you’d like to learn more about SMB cloud migrations and how to choose the right cloud provider to meet your company’s needs, be sure to register for the upcoming webinar titled “How to Know if Your Cloud Decision is Right for Your SMB.” The webinar, presented by Ed Dryer, senior technology strategist at Steadfast, will take place on Tuesday, August 22, 2017 at 2:00 p.m. EDT. |
Attendees will gain a better understanding of public, hybrid and private clouds for SMBs; learn the operational and cost benefits of virtualization; hear what is driving SMBs today to make cloud investments; and understand how cloud services complement business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) services, managed security, and on-demand infrastructure. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, you can REGISTER HERE. |
On Jan. 15, nine of 12 members of the National Park System Advisory Board sent a letter to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announcing their resignation, effectively dissolving the board. |
It was an act of protest against an administration with little appetite for the methodical approach the board has brought to national park management for decades. And it leaves the National Park Service without a means to establish new historic or natural landmarks, since federal law requires the advisory board to sign off on such designations. More significantly, perhaps, it’s another crack in the foundation of the Interior Department, which manages 500 million acres of public land and is already rattled by the prospect of some 4,000 job cuts. |
Since 1935, the nonpartisan experts on the National Park System Advisory Board have consulted with the Park Service on its policies and recommended new park units. Lady Bird Johnson served on the board, as did Western writer Wallace Stegner and numerous anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists, architects and social scientists. In recent years, the board has taken a special interest in protecting sites that are of value to Asian-American, African-American, Latino and LGBT communities, and it’s advised the Park Service on management strategies to deal with the impacts of climate change. |
When Zinke took office last spring, board members hoped to talk with him about these efforts. But the secretary seemed uninterested—perhaps not surprising, given that a leaked document outlining his department’s priorities scrubbed all mentions of climate change and diversity. In May, Zinke suspended the advisory board, along with some 200 other independent committees that offered management expertise to individual parks or regions. With few options to make their voices heard, advisory board members decided to resign en masse. |
Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift did not respond to a request for comment, but told the conservative Washington Examiner that the department “welcomes” the resignations of members who she claims ignored sexual harassment issues in the Park Service. |
Former Alaska governor and advisory board chairman Tony Knowles says sexual harassment didn’t fall under the board’s purview. He also talked with High Country News about why he quit and what the board’s dissolution means for the national park system. The following has been edited for length and clarity. |
HCN: Did you get the sense that until this year, the recommendations of the board were heeded, or at least heard? |
Tony Knowles: Yes, absolutely. Over the past 7 years, we really made a difference in the direction of the National Park Service. There was a great sense of collaboration. Our board members worked with more than 160 outside experts to come up with recommendations, including to approve 130 new historical landmarks. We went over recommendations carefully with former superintendent Jon Jarvis, and often they became part of Park Service policy. |
HCN: How did that change in the past year? |
TK: At the beginning, we were told that all of the advisory boards were suspended and we’d be notified when it would become part of the agenda to reinstate them. So we waited one, two, three, four months. There was no contract (to allow us to continue our work), no understanding of when a Park Service director would be appointed. In early October, I wrote a letter to Secretary Zinke explaining how the board wanted to meet to inform the new administration of what we envisioned to build a better park system in the 21st century, and to hear what their vision was. We got no answer. I pestered and pestered, and in mid-November got a one-sentence email from someone saying the secretary was very busy. That’s when we realized they were just running out the clock until our terms expired in May. |
HCN: Why did you decide to resign rather than try to influence the direction of the agency from within? |
TK: When you’re on permanent hold, at some time you’ve gotta hang up. There’s no one to talk to but yourselves. By nine of us resigning, we felt we’d be able to get the microphone briefly to at least talk to the American people about climate change, about preserving the natural diversity of wildlife, about making sure underrepresented minorities not only come to the parks but are employees there. All these things we think are important. We may be disappointed with the Department of the Interior, but we are not discouraged. Every single one of us will continue the fight to promote and protect our public lands. |
HCN: Given that your action is part of a larger pattern of resignations and layoffs at the Park Service, are you concerned about the agency’s future? |
TK: Of course we’re concerned. The secretary proposed a 13 percent budget reduction, which would all come out of personnel, then claimed he’s going to rebuild infrastructure by raising park entry fees. If we’re trying to increase the number of people from lower-income groups who want to come to our parks, that’s counter-productive. I also get worried when I think about the unprecedented reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah. We think those could be a preview of coming attractions for the National Park Service. |
Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Enters Not Guilty Pleas In 1st Public Court HearingFor the first plea, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev leaned toward a microphone and said, "Not guilty,'' in a Russian accent. He then said not guilty repeatedly about a half-dozen more times. |
Mayors Against Illegal Guns Apologizes For Calling Boston Bombing Suspect Victim Of Gun Violence The event is part of the gun-control group's 25-state "No More Names" tour, which is part of its campaign to build support for legislation to expand background checks for gun buyers. |
CBS News: Attack At Boston Marathon Was Supposed To Happen On July 4The official also said that Tsarnaev revealed that the bombs were constructed at his older brother Tamerlan's residence and that Tamerlan had brought Dzhokhar into the plot a couple of months before. |
October 30, 2017 Mancari offers stories of wandering and homecoming, colored by a determination to live, artistically, beyond the gender boundaries usually imposed on female artists. |
October 27, 2017 Watch the indie-rock band perform a song from Painted Ruins, its first new album after a five-year hiatus. |
October 26, 2017 Songwriter Sam Beam returns to the Cafe for a solo set in front of a live audience. |
October 27, 2017 Listen to a session recorded at Sound Stage Studios with longtime partner Gillian Welch. |
October 25, 2017 Kyle Vanes, of the band The Dales, says his song "Still the Love" was inspired by finding, and losing, the love of his life, who died of breast cancer in 2015. |
October 25, 2017 Son Little's new album, New Magic, is bumpy blues meets rooted R&B meets old school nu soul meets... well... magic. |
October 25, 2017 There is "no point in wasting sorrow on things that won't be here tomorrow" |
October 24, 2017 Before he could legally drive, my guest in this session had his first platinum record. Hear a studio session the blues prodigy, recorded live in Philadelphia. |
October 20, 2017 This year marks the 30th anniversary of her album Solitude Standing, and the 25th of 99.9F°. |
October 20, 2017 His self-released, self-titled debut EP captures his exuberance and musical openness, setting the stage for what promises to be a brilliant career. |
October 19, 2017 A performance session that brings a reminder of comfort in chaos, and community alike. |
October 19, 2017 Watch the young UK rockers perform a stripped-down version of their single, live at the KCRW studios. |
October 18, 2017 A reflection on the singer's impact on the entire nation of Canada, and his electric last performance on Aug. 20, 2016, in Kingston, Ontario. |
October 17, 2017 This is a band that can go from in-your-face to introspective on a dime — and they do just that in this session. |
Chee Wei Wong, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, was named a fellow of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. |
The society was founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies and annually organizes and sponsors major technical forums, exhibitions and education programs around the world. Fellows are members who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the fields of optics, photonics and imaging. Wong was recognized for his achievements in ultrafast optics, nonlinear photonics, quantum optics and precision measurements. |
Physical and wave electronics are Wong’s primary area of focus. Wong is the recipient of the 2018 National Institutes of Health’s Early Scientist Trailblazer Award and the 2016 Google Faculty Research Award. |
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