Besides CNN along with the rest of the corporate news only posting polls that are close (versus Rasmussen and Gallup who showed a bump for Obama) and trying to influence voters that more people are switching to McCain I had to agree with Thom Hartman yesterday.

I was listening to Thom Hartman yesterday and a solid point he made as to the reason why the polls are so close had to do with the right wing attack machine using the internet to spam.  There are some vicous outright lies attacking Barack Obama and his family circulating in people's email accounts.  Interesting enough one of the email's I received from my uncle who is a retired Master Sargent and receives all kinds of right wing propaganda.  He fowarded me
this smear. Thom Hartman reported yesterday that this was spammed to over one million email addresses. (and how many people fowarded this without fact checking?)

We've all been there.  A project is supposed to be done and turned in to the boss and for what ever reason you just can't turn it in.  Maybe you blew the project off to go drinking.  Maybe you just need a little more time to finish the project to your satisfaction.  What ever the reason you need to weasel yourself a little time.  Blaming the dog is perhaps a little archaic, now we complain about the network going down or a virus deleting all our hard work.  So what did the FBI tell the GAO when it came looking for information on the $78,700,000 the FBI requested for a data mining operation that might violate our privacy?  Take the red pill and jump to find out.

By Barry Steinhart, director of the ACLU Technology & Liberty Project.

A lot of Americans have gotten pretty steamed as we’ve learned more and more (though not as much as we should be learning) about how our government is engaging in illegal, mass eavesdropping on our communications.

But we’re not the only ones who have reason to be steamed about the spying centered at the National Security Agency.

The banking industry can have little love for Governor, formerly Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer.  It would seem that the U.S. prosecutor investigation of Spitzer was triggered by several banks ratting on him:

.... investigators conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor of New York, several officials said....

http://www.nytimes.com/...

By Barry Steinhardt, director the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project.

Yesterday’s report in The Wall Street Journal about the NSA’s domestic spy dragnets should be major, major news. It is nothing less than the return of TIA: "Total Information Awareness." Yet there has been barely any followup coverage of the story in the mainstream media. I know the media thinks the sexual behavior of the governor of New York is earth-shatteringly important for American life – but this NSA report actually is.

EPILOGUE:  All things considered I think this diary raises a more important point.

Is it me or could it be more than a coincidence these stories broke the same day?

WSJ: NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records.

ABC: It Wasn't the Sex; Suspicious $$ Transfers Led to Spitzer

The federal investigation of a New York prostitution ring was triggered by Gov. Eliot Spitzer's suspicious money transfers, initially leading agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes, according to federal officials.

I guess it depend when a suspicious transfer constitutes probable cause, and who reported it to the FBI or IRS.  Anyone know the legal issues here?

Crossposted to Green Mountain Daily

As part of a comprehensive package to control the costs of prescription drugs and regulate inappropriate marketing tactics, Vermont recently passed legislation that provides strong privacy protections by limiting the use of personally identifiable prescription information for marketing purposes unless doctors and other health care providers explicitly agree to waive the protections. The law, S.115, includes a physician opt-in provision at the time of licensure or renewal. This provision, managed by the state’s professional licensing board, allows a prescriber to choose to have his or her identifying information used for marketing and promotion of prescription drugs. The Vermont Medical Society supports the measure.

Taken from a fact sheet from the Prescription Project (link to pdf file)

That legislation's just been pushed back.  

The reason why?  

Read on.

I've written before about the potential dangers of datamining in business, politics, and surveillance.  Nicole Brodeur, in today's Seattle Times, writes about its use in the marketing of prescription drugs.

The short of it:  If you think your doctor's drug recommendations are based on science:  think again.

The weirdest stuff shows up @ my day job, Politics In Minnesota. The design of transportation systems carries its own ideology: the routes, exit placement, the eminent domain actions, the financing, carpool or toll road lanes; all these issues loom large in Minnesota, especially since no one can agree how to pay for needed work. St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood, the heart of the black community, got split in half by I-94, and many people today fear similar effects from massive new roads. Recently, people on the 'fringes' of the left and right who might be considered hostile to corporate globalization have talked about a 'NAFTA Superhighway' project which would link Mexico, Canada, and the United States, but little hard evidence illustrates how this plan could work.

This article in Vanity Fair will scare hell out of you and then enrage you. The idea that any detail of our lives is available to any politician, or person, willing to pay for it is scary as hell, and an invasion of privacy guaranteed to put you in the hypertension range in blood pressure.

Hello?? Has anyone seen the Constitution lately?? ANYONE??

Why bother with the Bill of Rights, who needs warrants, when you can just buy the info from your jolly local data miner!! HO HO HO!!

We know Rove got his start as a geeky numbers cruncher, a pioneer in direct mailing and other GOTV tactics even back in the 1980s.

We also know that since Bush came to power--and even before 9-11--his Administration was eager to undermine and even flout FISA laws and judges by doing what was called "modernizing" surveillance techniques.  This "modernization" included data mining, and we are only now beginning to realize how much it has undermined our privacy.

For background, on this story, I've tagged all the related stories at Green Mountain Daily (GMD), so they can all be accessed via this link.

The short summary: VT state police went to at least three pharmacies in the state, and asked them for large scale data dumps of patient records.  Green Mountain Daily found out, and a team effort brought this whole thing out into the open.

That said, I will once again quote the fourth amendment, but marked up the way I think that it's seen by some individuals:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

On Tuesday, I blogged about a breaking story in Vermont: Kiss your 4th amendment goodbye: VT State Police collect medical data.  Since then, a couple things have happened:

1. the press finally hit this, and it's broken big in Vermont's Rutland Herald;
2. we've done some research of our own, and have learned a bit more;

After the fold, I'll summarize some of what we at GMD (Green Mountain Daily) have learned, and what we learned from the Herald article as well.

It's always good to start with the constitution, this time from Amendment IV:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Yesterday, Green Mountain Daily scooped all the Vermont news outlets by publishing a story about state police collecting pharmacy records across the state.  You can find the original piece here on Kos or over at Green Mountain Daily.

A summary, after the jump

Are you sitting down for this?

A few weeks back, Caoimhin wrote a fantastic diary expressing concerns over proposed implementation of 2005's legislation creating the Vermont Prescription Monitoring System. At the time, he wrote:

The Department of Health is in the process of seeking legislative approval of administrative rules the Department drafted to govern VPMS. The proposed rules will monitor your physician's provision, and your access to, hundreds of treatments for thousands of conditions. The purpose of the law is intended to identify substance abusers and to facilitate their treatment -- nothing inherently wrong with that and in fact it is a laudable goal.  However, the proposed regulations by the Department of Health do not accomplish the goal set out by the legislature, violate the laws governing the VPMS and present too many dangers for disclosure, misuse, mishandling of sensitive patient medical information.

As CL stated, the law mandates collecting the minimum necessary information to achieve it's stated goals.

But instead of the Department of Health, we apparently needed to be watching out for the State Police.

Washington Post Staff Writer Ellen Nakashima reports that the US Government is not just listening to your phone calls, they are watching everywhere you go, who you sit next to and what you are reading.

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

I don't know how many dKos readers have heard about the Rapleaf/Upscoop/Trustfuse scandal, or the similar but not-connected Quechup/iDate scandal, but for those who have and those who haven't, here is something interesting which may tie into Granny Doc's recent post, "Big Brother IS Watching You" and also the documented efforts by the PTB to protect their civilian corporate subcontractors of unconstitutionality.

Auren Hoffman, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been playing the wide-eyed ingenue ever since his Rapleaf/Upscoop/Trustfuse project blew up in a cloud of flying spam mails, is an old Young Republican.

What is Rapleaf, and why should you worry about it? I'll tell you - it begins with an email I got last week that I first marked as "spam" and ignored, until I ran across a blog post warning against this outfit.

Why am I not shocked? Because I've been shocked so many times, I can barely "feel" the news anymore.

The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau breaks the unsurprising but nonetheless galling news:

[D]ocuments indicate that the F.B.I. used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on the person it was targeting but also details on his or her "community of interest" -- the network of people that the target in turn was in contact with.

But rest assured... The F.B.I. says they're no longer doing this. Do you feel better?