Author: Jeff Cassman

The Justice Department filing claims that Twitter was in “privacy compliance chaos” after Musk took over, according to John Davisson, director of litigation at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “Responsible officials exited the company, security controls were abandoned, products were introduced or radically altered with no attention paid to user privacy,” Davisson said. “Musk’s erratic decision-making repeatedly put the privacy of users at risk and clearly violated the 2022 consent decree.” 

If the government finds that Twitter violated the consent decree, it has a few options, Davisson and McGee told Quartz. It can negotiate a third consent decree and levy an even bigger civil penalty than the $150 million Twitter agreed to pay in 2022, it can sue Twitter and hash it out in court if the company won’t agree to settle, it could impose an independent monitor to oversee Twitter’s compliance, or it could limit the ways Twitter makes money off of user data. 

Read more here.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit focused on bolstering the right to privacy, defines data brokers as companies that collect and categorize personal information, usually to build profiles on millions of Americans that the companies can then rent, sell or use to provide services. The data they collect, per EPIC, can include: “names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, gender, age, marital status, children, education, profession, income, political preferences, and cars and real estate owned.” 

That’s not to mention “information on an individual’s purchases, where they shop, and how they pay for their purchases,” plus “health information, the sites we visit online, and the advertisements we click on. And thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and wearables, data brokers collect and sell real-time location data.” 

Privacy advocates have warned for years that location and seemingly non-specific personal data — often collected by advertisers and amassed and sold by brokers — can be used to identify individuals. They also charge that the data often isn’t well secured and that the brokers aren’t covered by laws that require the clear consent of the person being tracked. They’ve argued for both legal and technical protections so that consumers can push back. 

Read more here.

On September 15h, 1950, United Nations troops landed at Inch’ŏn, South Korea, crippling a North Korean invasion during the Korean War.

—

The position recently mentioned in: Opportunity for Retreat Group Membership in a Secure Bug Out Location is still available. If you are interested, then let us know. To clarify: The retreat is located in Kansas.

—

SurvivalBlog Writing Contest

Today we present another entry for Round 108 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The prizes for this round include:

First Prize:

1. The photovoltaic power specialists at Quantum Harvest LLC  are providing a store-wide 10% off coupon. Depending on the model chosen, this could be worth more than $2000.
2. A Gunsite Academy Three Day Course Certificate. This can be used for any of their one, two, or three-day course (a $1,095 value),
3. Two cases of Mountain House freeze-dried assorted entrees in #10 cans, courtesy of Ready Made Resources (a $350 value),
4. A $250 gift certificate good for any product from Sunflower Ammo,
5. American Gunsmithing Institute (AGI) is providing a $300 certificate good towards any of their DVD training courses.
6. Two sets of The Civil Defense Manual, (in two volumes) — a $193 value — kindly donated by the author, Jack Lawson.

Second Prize:

1. A SIRT STIC AR-15/M4 Laser Training Package, courtesy of Next Level Training, that has a combined retail value of $679
2. Two 1,000-foot spools of full mil-spec U.S.-made 750 paracord (in-stock colors only) from www.TOUGHGRID.com (a $240 value).
3. Two Super Survival Pack seed collections, a $150 value, courtesy of Seed for Security, LLC.
4. Montana Survival Seed is providing a $225 gift code for any items on its website, including organic non-GMO seeds, fossils, 1812-1964 US silver, jewelry, botany books, and Montana beeswax.
5. A transferable $150 FRN purchase credit from Elk Creek Company, toward the purchase of any pre-1899 antique gun. There is no paperwork required for delivery of pre-1899 guns into most states, making them the last bastion of firearms purchasing privacy!

Third Prize:

1. A $300 gift certificate from Good2Goco.com, good for any of their products: Home freeze dryers, pressure canners, Country Living grain mills, Emergency Essentials foods, and much more.
2. Three sets each of made-in-USA regular and wide-mouth reusable canning lids. (This is a total of 300 lids and 600 gaskets.) This prize is courtesy of Harvest Guard (a $270 value)
3. A Royal Berkey water filter, courtesy of Directive 21 (a $275 value),
4. A transferable $150 FRN purchase credit from Elk Creek Company, toward the purchase of any pre-1899 antique gun.

—

More than $840,000 worth of prizes have been awarded since we started running this contest. We recently polled blog readers, asking for suggested article topics. Refer to that poll if you haven’t yet chosen an article topic. Round 108 ends on September 30th, so…

One sees many flags at half-mast across the country today. And rightly so. Thanks in part to the negligence and incompetence of the CIA and FBI, the Federal government  failed disastrously at what it tells us is the regime’s number-one priority: public safety.  

[Read More: “9/11 Was a Day of Unforgivable Government Failure” by Ryan McMaken]

More than 2,900 human beings died that day, the overwhelming majority of which were civilians working in ordinary private-sector jobs. Most of them paid taxes for many years to the government which told them that the government keeps them safe. Many victims continue to die to this day from illnesses caused by inhalation of building debris. 

But the response to 9/11 has done far more damage to the republic than the perpetrators of 9/11 ever could. Even worse, the regime’s architects of the countless assaults on freedom and human rights that have come in the wake of 9/11 have never been punished.

After 9/11 we were forced to endure nearly two decades of major wars. The Iraq war relied on post-9/11 fears to push the narrative that Saddam Hussein had weapons that could be used to attack Americans. US regime mouthpieces repeatedly hinted that Saddam maybe had planned or funded the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban in Afghanistan were essentially blamed for training the terrorists said to have perpetrated 9/11. (The fact that the Saudis were likely bankrolling the terrorists was carefully avoided.)  In the end, the wars did absolutely nothing to enhance either the freedom or the safety of Americans. Thousands of American families have paid for these pointless wars with their own blood or with the blood of their sons and brothers and fathers. Hundreds of millions of Americans continue to pay for the wars through higher taxes to service war debts, and through the inevitable price inflation that has come after two decades of runaway spending.  All this, of course, ignores the hundreds of thousands of innocent foreign victims of the regime. 

On the domestic front, we’ve also fallen victim to 20 years of the federal government shredding the rights supposedly protected by the Bill of Rights. Between the Patriot act, the TSA, countless abuses of the FISA court, and non-stop spying on peaceful Americans, the federal government’s “war on terror” has largely been a war on Americans. Or as Patrick Eddington put it in 2021: 

From the creation of the sprawling, privacy invading Department of Homeland Security (2002) to the passage of the FISA Amendments Act (2008, required to make portions of the previously illegal Stellarwind program legal) to the Transportation Security Agency’s (TSA) Quiet Skies passenger surveillance programs (2012) to the burgeoning use of facial recognition by law enforcement at all levels, we now live in an age where our buying habits, web browsing history, air travel records, social media posts and more can be collected, analyzed and weaponized against us — often with little or no pretext or true, valid criminal predicate. … In all the ways that matter, Americans are now viewed by their government as suspects first, citizens second. 

Ridiculously, all of this has…