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Heroes Community > Other Side of the Monitor > Thread: Government abuse of power
Thread: Government abuse of power This thread is 4 pages long: 1 2 3 4 · «PREV / NEXT»
Elodin
Elodin


Promising
Legendary Hero
Free Thinker
posted June 27, 2013 06:09 PM

The IRS is too big and has too much power. It is corrupt to the core. We need to go to a simple tax system, downsize the IRS, and pull its teeth.

Hopefully people don't get tired of hearing about the IRS shenanigans and keep pressure on Congress to ferret out the corruption.
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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted June 27, 2013 06:18 PM

Quote:
The IRS is too big and has too much power. It is corrupt to the core. We need to go to a simple tax system, downsize the IRS, and pull its teeth.

Hopefully people don't get tired of hearing about the IRS shenanigans and keep pressure on Congress to ferret out the corruption.


but who ferrets out the corrupt in congress? or any of the other higher-end people?

just WHO can ferret out the corruption, is a good question, indeed...

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blizzardboy
blizzardboy


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Nerf Herder
posted June 27, 2013 07:02 PM

Man I hope they can use Lerner's claim of innocence to nullify her pleading of the fifth. I would soooo love to see that ***** under questioning.

Did you know she still had flipping access to the IRS computer system after she was suspended? What is this I don't even.
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Elodin
Elodin


Promising
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Free Thinker
posted June 27, 2013 07:04 PM

The voters are supposed to get rid of corrupt congressmen. But most voters are too uninterested in keeping up with vote for someone even if he is corrupt merely because he is a member of the party they support.
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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted June 27, 2013 07:35 PM

@ elodin: true, but something you should take into account, is that those votes might not count. who's to say they are even used? they weren't with g.w. bush. i think that the voting process is just there merely to placate the masses, to let them think that they're in control.

put yourself in a power's frame of mind. it's what i would do, if i had power, and was corrupt. i wouldn't let anything happen that i didn't want to happen, especially where my role as a power would be concerned. and i'd make sure that i had the friends, or the people i could make do what i wish, to help make that happen, using my power.

it's pretty simple, when you put yourself in their frame of mind. makes sense, too. powerful people, with powerful friends, all helping each other out, for profit, for ***** and giggles, to continue their way, whatever.

doesn't the mass public, by some graph or poll, favor certain things, and those things aren't realized? and, when they greatly disfavor something, isn't that very thing continued regardless?

because the votes don't count. because it is all a sham. because we have no control. i see no evidence telling me otherwise.

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baklava
baklava


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Legendary Hero
Mostly harmless
posted July 05, 2013 04:50 AM
Edited by baklava at 04:51, 05 Jul 2013.

Didn't really know where to put this and didn't feel like making a new thread.

Seriously Texas.

Jail time for a joke of dubious taste in LoL chat? Going up to eight years? I thought that stuff was reserved for grandma telling me what it was like under the commies.



Disclaimer:
With regards to the semantic side of OSM discussions, I'll point out, just in case, that there was no League of Legends in pre-1980s communist Yugoslavia, although the early concept of farming creeps is evident in the average lifespan of a Nazi per partisan film.

No, the communism comparison was about jail time for undesirable jokes and the healthy atmosphere of knowing that whatever you do, there's a solid chance of your neighbour ratting it out to the authorities. Similar to McCarthyism, just with the irritating addition of everyone insisting you're their comrade.

At any rate, this might prompt me to return to LoL, if only to paste the kid's joke over and over and see if we get bombed again.
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mvassilev
mvassilev


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Undefeatable Hero
posted July 05, 2013 05:52 AM

And then there's this.
Quote:
Henderson police arrested a family for refusing to let officers use their homes as lookouts for a domestic violence investigation of their neighbors, the family claims in court...

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baklava
baklava


Honorable
Legendary Hero
Mostly harmless
posted July 05, 2013 02:58 PM

Jesus. Right out of the Monty Python Flying Circus.
Well. One thing's for sure, it certainly terrified the living **** out of the guy beating his wife next door.
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"Let me tell you what the blues
is. When you ain't got no
money,
you got the blues."
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mvassilev
mvassilev


Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 07, 2013 09:33 PM

Quote:
Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit...

It can also be difficult to trace an IP address to a physical address, which can lead to yet more mistaken raids. An example of that problem manifested in one of the more bizarre botched raids in recent years. It took place in September 2006, when a SWAT team from the Bedford County sheriff’s department stormed the rural Virginia home of A. J. Nuckols, his wife, and their two children. Police had traced the IP address of someone trading child porn online to the Nuckols’ physical address. They had made a mistake. As if the shock of having his house invaded by a SWAT team wasn’t enough, Nuckols was in for another surprise. In a letter to the editor of the Chatham Star Review, he described the raid: “Men ran at me, dropped into shooting position, double-handed semi-automatic pistols pointed at me, and made me put my hands against my truck. I was held at gunpoint, searched, taunted, and led into the house. I had no idea what this was about. I was scared beyond description.”

He then looked up, and saw... former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal.

O’Neal, an aspiring lawman, had been made an “honorary deputy” with the department. Though he had no training as a SWAT officer, Shaq apparently had gone on several such raids with other police departments around the country. The thrill of bringing an untrained celebrity along apparently trumped the requirement that SWAT teams be staffed only with the most elite, most highly qualified and best-trained cops.
source
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Elodin
Elodin


Promising
Legendary Hero
Free Thinker
posted July 09, 2013 04:14 PM

The IRS posted 100,000 social security numbers on the internet. Those folks are going to have a hard time with identity thieves. The IRS is fundamentally broken.

Quote:

The IRS mistakenly posted the Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of Americans on a government website, the agency confirmed Monday night. One estimate put the figure as high as 100,000 names.

The numbers were posted to an IRS database for tax-exempt political groups known as 527s and first discovered by the group Public.Resource.org.



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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 09, 2013 05:05 PM

lol, a "mistake". i wonder which political groups were put at risk? i would guess, the people who put them in a negative light in the news, maybe...

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markkur
markkur


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Once upon a time
posted July 09, 2013 05:07 PM

So broken they don't WARN the people that have those numbers?


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bloodsucker
bloodsucker


Legendary Hero
posted July 09, 2013 08:21 PM

Conservatives

Quote:
I was under the impression that both republicans aand democrats are conservatives.


I think is like saying you are a kinder man then I because you just want to behead your oponents and put their heads on a stick over the front gate and I want to crucify them by the road...


In Portugal we have the same problem with Socialists and Social Democrats.
You allmost can choose to be one or the other because you like this color more (like socker teams), programs don't diverge that much.

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xerox
xerox


Promising
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 10, 2013 01:00 AM
Edited by xerox at 01:01, 10 Jul 2013.

Quote:
You allmost can choose to be one or the other because you like this color more (like socker teams), programs don't diverge that much.


A lot of countries have that and my theory is that the cause is the fall of socialism. Now socialism has fallen for two reasons. The Soviet Union fell and globalisation prevailed. When you have to compete against the whole world, socialist reforms are suddenly not that attractive anymore. You also have things like the European Union which just doesn't allow true, protectionistic socialism. Now what this has caused is a massive shift in ideology. The grand battle between a red left and a blue right has been replaced by a battle between lighter blue and darker blue. All ideologies are variations of capitalism.

Now the US doesn't have the "problem" (if you want to call it that) you mentioned. On the contrary, they are more politically divided than for a long time. And I'd say that's because the american connection to socialism has been pretty much non-existant.
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bloodsucker
bloodsucker


Legendary Hero
posted July 10, 2013 01:16 AM

Now what this has caused is a massive shift in ideology. The grand battle between a red left and a blue right has been replaced by a battle between lighter blue and darker blue. All ideologies are variations of capitalism.

Now the US doesn't have the "problem" (if you want to call it that) you mentioned. On the contrary, they are more politically divided than for a long time. And I'd say that's because the american connection to socialism has been pretty much non-existant.



I think you're right, even if they are both conservatives and ultimatly use the same tricks to stay in business, Republicans and Democrats diverge more right now then they ever diverged during the last 50 years of XX century.

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Elodin
Elodin


Promising
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Free Thinker
posted July 10, 2013 03:00 AM

The US Postal service photographs the outside of every single piece of mail that goes through the system. I'll bet Fedex is being required to do the same. There appears to be no aspect of our lives in which the government is not spying on us.

Clicky
Quote:

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.

The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Opening the mail would require a warrant.) The information is sent to the law enforcement agency that asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.

The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retrace the path of mail at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit in the fraud section of the criminal division of the Justice Department and worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be, ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”


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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 10, 2013 03:13 AM

@ elodin: read that yesterday or the day before. i didn't think to put it in this thread. but then, i didn't figure that it was news. it's just more stuff that people don't pay attention to, and for the "tin foil hat types", like me, lol.
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Elodin
Elodin


Promising
Legendary Hero
Free Thinker
posted July 18, 2013 06:48 AM

Do you drive in the US? Police departments keep a record of your comings and goings for years.

Clicky
Quote:

(CNN) -- Police around the United States are recording the license plates of passing drivers and storing the information for years with little privacy protection, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday.

The information potentially allows authorities to track the movements of everyone who drives a car.

The ACLU documented the police surveillance after reviewing 26,000 pages of material gathered through public records requests to almost 600 local and state police departments in 38 states and the District of Columbia.

Police are gathering the vehicle information with surveillance technology called automatic license plate readers, and it's being stored -- sometimes indefinitely -- with few or no privacy protections, the ACLU said.

"The documents paint a startling picture of a technology deployed with too few rules that is becoming a tool for mass routine location tracking and surveillance," the ACLU said in a written statement.

The license plate readers alert police to an automobile associated with an investigation, "but such instances account for a tiny fraction of license plate scans, and too many police departments are storing millions of records about innocent drivers," the ACLU said.

.....

The readers have been proliferating at "worrying speed" and are typically mounted on bridges, overpasses and patrol cars, the ACLU said.

The devices use high-speed cameras, and the software analyzes the photographs to retrieve the plate number, the group said.

The system then runs the data against "hot lists" of plate numbers and produces an instant alert when a match, or "hit," registers, the group said. The hot lists include the National Crime Information Center file, which includes stolen cars and vehicles used in the commission of a crime.

"License plate readers would pose few civil liberties risks if they only checked plates against hot lists and these hot lists were implemented soundly. But these systems are configured to store the photograph, the license plate number, and the date, time, and location where all vehicles are seen — not just the data of vehicles that generate hits," the ACLU report said.

The growing collection of data allows police to create "a single, high-resolution image of our lives," and the constant monitoring "can chill the exercise of our cherished rights to free speech and association," the group said.


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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 18, 2013 08:29 AM

Elodin said:
Do you drive in the US? Police departments keep a record of your comings and goings for years.

Clicky
Quote:

(CNN) -- Police around the United States are recording the license plates of passing drivers and storing the information for years with little privacy protection, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday.

The information potentially allows authorities to track the movements of everyone who drives a car.

The ACLU documented the police surveillance after reviewing 26,000 pages of material gathered through public records requests to almost 600 local and state police departments in 38 states and the District of Columbia.

Police are gathering the vehicle information with surveillance technology called automatic license plate readers, and it's being stored -- sometimes indefinitely -- with few or no privacy protections, the ACLU said.

"The documents paint a startling picture of a technology deployed with too few rules that is becoming a tool for mass routine location tracking and surveillance," the ACLU said in a written statement.

The license plate readers alert police to an automobile associated with an investigation, "but such instances account for a tiny fraction of license plate scans, and too many police departments are storing millions of records about innocent drivers," the ACLU said.

.....

The readers have been proliferating at "worrying speed" and are typically mounted on bridges, overpasses and patrol cars, the ACLU said.

The devices use high-speed cameras, and the software analyzes the photographs to retrieve the plate number, the group said.

The system then runs the data against "hot lists" of plate numbers and produces an instant alert when a match, or "hit," registers, the group said. The hot lists include the National Crime Information Center file, which includes stolen cars and vehicles used in the commission of a crime.

"License plate readers would pose few civil liberties risks if they only checked plates against hot lists and these hot lists were implemented soundly. But these systems are configured to store the photograph, the license plate number, and the date, time, and location where all vehicles are seen — not just the data of vehicles that generate hits," the ACLU report said.

The growing collection of data allows police to create "a single, high-resolution image of our lives," and the constant monitoring "can chill the exercise of our cherished rights to free speech and association," the group said.




yep, figured this already, too. in fact, i had posted about it before, and people on here treated me like a tinfoil hat type, if i recall. i have deleted all of those prior posts a while back, when i was planning on leaving here, so i can't post a link for proof. but, what i said then is the same thing i'll repeat now, that i have also been telling my family for a couple of years, now(and now i will have something to show them, to prove what i have been saying):

"those camera's i see everywhere, that everyone think is just for traffic control, catching people who speed, and running stoplights? you know what it reminds me of? a tree stand(a tree stand, for those who don't know, is a hunting term). a hunter will post a tree stand where deer travel frequently, and especially where those deer-paths cross. so that when they come and go, he will be able to see them, and take his pick of which one he wants to shoot."

just one more thing that proves what i have been saying. i wonder when people will start listening to me? lol, i kinda feel like woody harrelson's character in that movie "2012". i remember the scene where john cusack's character's kid asks him, "is that man crazy, daddy?"(referring to woody), and john cusack's character replying, "we thought he was, honey. we thought he was."

i remember slapping my friends in the theater and saying, "see, mother****ers? see?"

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Fauch
Fauch


Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
posted July 18, 2013 03:55 PM

you're governed by a bunch of paranoids. is there a single thing they don't spy yet?

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