The US House of Representatives quietly passed a last-minute addition to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill for 2013 last week – including a provision protecting genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks.
via ‘Monsanto Protection Act’ slips silently through US Congress
Big Brother is watching. Now get used to it!
Envisioning a future where privacy is a thing of the past, Mayor Bloomberg said Friday it will soon be impossible to escape the watchful eyes of surveillance cameras and even drones in the city.
He acknowledged privacy concerns, but said “you can’t keep the tides from coming in.”
“You wait, in five years, the technology is getting better, they’ll be cameras everyplace . . . whether you like it or not,” Bloomberg said.
The security measures have drawn scorn from some civil libertarians — but Bloomberg scoffed at privacy concerns on his Friday morning program on WOR-AM.
“The argument against using automation is just this craziness that ‘Oh, it’s Big Brother,’” Bloomberg said. “Get used to it!”
The New York Civil Liberties Union has documented nearly 2,400 surveillance cameras fixed on public spaces in Manhattan alone. Many are operated by the police, others by poroperty owners.
In Lower Manhattan, an initiative developed after 9/11 known as the “Ring of Steel” integrates the NYPD’s cameras with those of banks and other institutions.
But in the future, the cameras won’t just be planted on buildings and utility poles. Some of them will be able to fly, the mayor pointed out.
“It’s scary,” Bloomberg said. “But what’s the difference whether the drone is up in the air or on the building? I mean intellectually I have trouble making a distinction. And you know you’re gonna have face recognition software. People are working on that.”
Bloomberg warned that drones would be able to peep into private residences – but that Peeping Tom legislation could help maintain some privacy.
Full article: http://www.nydailyne … ty-article-1.1296103
Call it the Rick Perry gold rush: The governor wants to bring the state’s gold reserves back from a New York vault to Texas.
And he may have legislative support to do it. Freshman Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, is carrying a bill that would establish the Texas Bullion Depository, a secure state-based bank to house $1 billion worth of gold bars owned by the University of Texas Investment Management Co., or UTIMCO, and stored by the Federal Reserve.
The idea isn’t entirely new. Some Republicans worked on a gold bill last session that was never filed. And gold-standard-backing Ron Paul, the former Lake Jackson congressman, has raised repeated concerns about the safety of states’ gold supplies.
“If you think gold is a hedge, or a protection, you always want it as close to the individual and the entity as possible,” Paul told The Texas Tribune on Thursday. “Texas is better served if it knows exactly where the gold is rather than depending on the security of the Federal Reserve.”
Bringing Texas’ gold home has gained traction this session because of Perry’s vocal support. On conservative radio host Glenn Beck’s show Tuesday, the governor said Texas is “in the process” — the legislative process, he later clarified — of “bringing gold that belongs to the state of Texas back into the state.”
He argued that the state is at least as capable as the Federal Reserve of safeguarding Texas’ “physical gold.”
“If we own it,” Perry said, “I will suggest to you that that’s not someone else’s determination whether we can take possession of it back or not.”
Full article: http://www.star-tele … seeks-to-create.html
