Employers Asking for Passwords to Employees’ Facebook Accounts

Source: Calgary Herald
Shelia Nonato

Job seeker Rob MacLeod says he was "taken aback" when an interviewer asked for his Facebook login and password so he could screen MacLeod's photos as part of the job interview.

But privacy experts say asking for social media passwords is crossing the line of "reasonable" employment criteria, akin to asking out-of-bounds questions on age or ethnicity.

MacLeod said he questioned why this was necessary.

"He just pretty much became defensive himself saying 'Oh, you know, if you have something to hide . . . we don't have to go forward in this process,' " MacLeod told Postmedia News.

MacLeod, a 28-year-old Oakville, Ont., resident, said he offered to log the interviewer in, but he refused, asking to access MacLeod's account directly.

"I have nothing to hide. (I said) 'You can look at it. I just don't like to disclose passwords,' " he recalled of the law enforcement position he applied for in 2009.

After the interviewer logged into MacLeod's account, MacLeod said the interviewer came back and explained, "We just want to see some of the photos and see what people you are involved in."

Meanwhile, privacy law experts worry about how the line between private and public life is being blurred in social media.

KONY 2012: State Propaganda for a New Generation - Must Read

Source: Vigilant Citizen

The overnight viral sensation KONY 2012 brought worldwide awareness to the African war criminal Joseph Kony. Beneath this commendable cause, lies however an elaborate agenda that is presented in the video in a very manipulative way. We’ll look at the agenda behind KONY 2012 and how it uses reverse psychology to not only justify a military operation in Africa, but to actually have people demand it.

...

KONY 2012 is less of a documentary than it is a highly efficient infomercial that is tailor-made for the Facebook generation, using state-of-the-art marketing techniques to make its point. Young people like “underground movements” and want to feel like they are changing the world. KONY 2012 taps into these needs to bring about something that is not “hip” or “underground” at all: A military operation in Uganda. Not only that, it urges the participants of the movement to order stuff, to wear bracelets that are associated with an online profile and to record their actions in social media. This makes KONY 2012 the first artificially created movement that is fully track-able, monitor-able and quantifiable by those who engendered it. In other words, what appears to be a movement “from the people” is actually a new way for the elite to advance its agenda.

A Propaganda Experiment

The video begins with an interesting statement: “The next 27 minutes are an experiment. But in order for it to work, you have to pay attention”. It is an experiment as it tests a new, groundbreaking way to get an agenda accepted by the Facebook generation. In the past, when the government needed to justify the invasion of a country, the President would sit in front of the camera and tell the public why war should be declared in this area of the world. In the case of KONY, the military agenda is disguised as grassroots activism, where the US army entering Uganda would be perceived as a “victory of the people”, effectively reversing the communications model.

Read Full Article 

FBI Creating a System for Monitoring All Conversations on Social Networking Sites

Source: Natural News
J. D. Heyes

(NaturalNews) If you're a regular reader of NaturalNews, you're already well aware of the fact that government, the courts and private industry have all essentially disregarded the intent and meaning of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment privacy protections in the age of information technology. It seems that you give up your right to be "secure" in your "persons, houses, papers, and effects" if you dare to use a social media network or virtually any other information exchange system.

The latest onslaught comes from the FBI, which is only the most recent federal agency seeking to monitor all of your conversations on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The bureau has placed a request from tech firms to develop a program that would enable agents to sift through waves of "publicly available" information, ostensibly to look for keywords related to terrorism, criminal activity and other threats to national security.

'Early warning' system?

The goal, according to the bureau's request, is to develop a sort of early warning system that provides real-time intelligence to improve "the FBI's overall situational awareness." The proposed program must "have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats."

The FBI joins DARPA - the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in searching for a program that can "monitor" social media chatter (DARPA, ironically enough, invented the Internet, not Al Gore). The difference there, however, is that the Defense Department and the CIA focus on threats overseas; the FBI, meanwhile, is a domestic law enforcement apparatus, and as such, subject to constitutional restrictions regarding the development of its cases.

Kony 2012: Wrapping Imperialism in "Activism"

Source: NileBowie
Nile Bowie

Editor's Note: It is worth mentioning the background of "Invisible Children's" CEO, Ben Keesey and that he was formally pursuing a career at JP Morgan before suddenly becoming an advocate for a US AFRICOM invasion of resource rich Africa.

Like other fraudulent NGOs including Avaas.org who's founder is formally of Fortune 500-funded, George Soros and Zbignew Brzezinski's International Crisis Group (page 5) as well as the Soros-affiliated MoveOn.org, they exist within one degree of separation from the most depraved corporate-financier interests on earth, promoting identical agendas of invasion, war, occupation, and foreign meddling.

Youth Movement Promotes US Military Presence in Central Africa

Edward Bernays believed that society could not be trusted to make rational and informed decisions on their own, and that guiding public opinion was essential within a democratic society. Bernays founded the Council on Public Relations and his 1928 book, Propaganda cites the methodology used in the application of effective emotional communication. He discovered that such communication is capable of manipulating the unconscious in an effort to produce a desired effect – namely, a capacity to manufacture mass social adherence in support of products, political candidates and social movements. Nearly a century after his heyday, Bernays’ methodology is apparent in almost every form of civic and consumer persuasion. The platform of social media is being used in unprecedented new ways, one such example is a new online documentary about the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an extremist rebel group operating in Central Africa.

The documentary is unprecedented, not for its educational attributes but for its capacity to use visual branding, merchandising and highly potent emotional communication to influence the viewer to support US military operations in resource rich Central Africa under the pretext of capturing the LRA’s commander, Joseph Kony. The Lord’s Resistance Army was originally formed in 1987 in northwestern Uganda by members of the Acholi ethnic group, who were historically exploited as forced laborers by the British colonialists and later relegated by the nation’s dominant ethic groups following independence. Together with the Holy Spirit Movement, the LRA represented the armed wing of a resistance faction aiming to overthrow the government of current Ugandan President and staunch US military ally, Yoweri Museveni.

The LRA was originally formed to combat ethic marginalization, but soon became dominated by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed spiritual messenger of the (Christian) Holy Spirit. Kony utilized his messianic persona to lead a syncretic spiritual movement based on Acholi tribal beliefs’ and extremist Christian dogma. It is claimed that LRA seeks to establish a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments, however its inner ideological mythology is largely unknown. In an effort to mobilize a large scale armed resistance, the LRA routinely recruited child soldiers and forced them to commit heinous acts such as cannibalism and mutilation on others who resisted to join the rebel group during their extensive twenty-five year campaign.

KONY 2012 is directed by Jason Russell and runs just thirty minutes; the video has received over twenty million views on YouTube and Vimeo and it’s national support group on Facebook is said to gain 4,000 members each hour. The highly produced feature is narrated from the perspective of Russell and his attempt to explain the Lord’s Resistance Army to his infant son, Gavin. The video features footage from Russell’s trip to Uganda (prior to 2006, when the LRA was still operating in the region) and introduces the viewer to Jacob, a Ugandan boy who was formally recruited by the LRA as a child soldier. Russell presents various montages of ethically diverse groups of students raising their fists in the air, sporting KONY t-shirts, and scenes of mass celebration in response to President Obama signing the S. 1067: Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009.

The "Twitter Revolution" Myth

Source: Boiling Frogs Post

TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:

As anyone who has logged on to the internet in the last five years is all too aware, social media websites have exploded in popularity to the point where they are virtually impossible to avoid.

Facebook is expected to hit one billion users later this year. Twitter handles almost 300 million tweets per day. Every second, one hour of video footage is uploaded to YouTube.

With this rise in popularity of social media has come an attendant rise in another trend: the dinosaur media’s attempts to portray these websites as revolutionary tools for freedom loving people around the world.

Document Proves DHS is Monitoring Social Media for Government Criticism

Source: Prison Planet
Paul Joseph Watson

Keywords agency is tracking include “body scanner,” “nationalist” , “police,” and “immigration”

A Homeland Security training manual belies claims made by DHS representatives during a Congressional hearing last week that the federal agency is only monitoring social media outlets for “situational awareness,” and proves the fact that Big Sis is also tracking online criticism of government, including discussion of airport body scanners.

“Analysts for a Department of Homeland Security program that monitors social networks like Twitter and Facebook have been instructed to produce reports on policy debates related to the department, a newly disclosed manual shows,” reports the New York Times.

The manual, entitled Department of Homeland Security National Operations Center Media Monitoring Capability Desktop Reference Binder, was obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center via a FOIA request.

The controversy over DHS spying on social media erupted last month following the release of 300 documents which detailed how DHS had hired an outside contractor, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, to monitor social media outlets along with a list of websites, on a “24/7/365 basis,” in order to uncover “any media reports that reflect adversely on the U.S. Government and the Department of Homeland Security.”

During a subsequent Congressional hearing on the matter, DHS representatives Mary Callahan and Richard Chávez denied the fact that tracking criticism of government agencies formed any part of the program, and that the effort was merely aimed at developing “situational awareness” of potential threats, mostly related to extreme weather events.

However, the 2011 manual makes it abundantly clear that the program was a backdoor effort to keep tabs on what the American people were saying about not just the DHS, but a whole host of federal agencies, including the CIA, the ATF, the TSA, FEMA, as well as organizations outside of the U.S. government such as the United Nations and the Red Cross.

Top Social Media Websites Caught Censoring Controversial Content

Source: Washington's Blog

Censorship By Top Social Media Websites

Facebook pays low-wage foreign workers to delete certain content based upon a censorship list. For example, Facebook deletes accounts created by Palestinian resistance groups.

Digg was caught censoring stories which were controversial or too critical of the government. See this and this.

Now, even social media site Reddit – which helped launch the anti-Sopa Internet blackout and publicize GoDaddy’s slimy Sopa support – is doing the same thing.

As just one example, posts from this website are being censored by Reddit. Specifically, a friend of this site who has submitted stories to Reddit has received the following messages of rejection from a Reddit moderator named davidreiss666:

from davidreiss666 via /r/worldnews/

WashingtonBlog is not something we consider a good source for r/Worldnews. From davidreiss666 via /r/worldnews/

Please submit that story from an alternate domain. Thank you.

And another moderator named Maxion:

from Maxion via /r/worldnews/
I am sorry but this submission is not appropriate for this subreddit.

There are certainly also more open-minded moderators at Reddit. But a couple of censors can squash discussion on entire topics.

Why Are They Censoring?

Why are they censoring?

Well, censorship is rampant in America … and social media has grown so big that it has become a target as well.

In addition, as I pointed out last year [for ease of reading, we'll skip indentation]:
Wired reported on Friday:

The Pentagon is looking to build a tool to sniff out social media propaganda campaigns and spit some counter-spin right back at it.

FBI, DHS, Pentagon, Fed Using Social Media for Spying, Propaganda

Source: Corbett Report


TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation posted a Request for Information last month calling on IT companies to demonstrate their ability to design software for monitoring, mapping and analyzing social media.

The RFI, posted to the government’s Federal Business Opportunities website in January, reveals the FBI’s desire for software capable of monitoring social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to provide alerts and analysis for publicly posted information. The software would require the ability to: