Found this little ditty over on the Above Top Secret site. Seems another one of our elected thugs in congress has nothing better to do than commit treason against his constituents. The thug this time is Representative Rick Boucher (democrat from Virginia), the new chairman of the House Subcommittee tasked with telecommunications technology and the Internet. This enemy of free expression, living comfortably in the back pockets of big media and telecommunications, is planning to craft legislation designed to obliterate millions of independent voices on the Internet (that would be blogs and alternative news sites) and shift power back into the hands of big media and big telcom.
In a nut-shell, what Rep. Boucher is trying to do is introduce new privacy legislation soon, but nothing is on the table, yet. Still, industry insiders are speculating that new legislation might require Web companies (blogs like mine or websites like blogacause or the companies like google which serve ads on blogacause) to obtain consumers' explicit opt-in consent before tracking them online and serving targeted ads.
Infuriatingly disguised as "online privacy advocacy", Boucher is, in reality, a big media hatchet-man, devising the genocide of the Internet culture. Given the rampant abuse of the Government collusion with big telcom to monitor your online activity, you can be certain the Chairman of the "House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet" has no real interest in your privacy, and every interest in keeping campaign contributions flowing, and information contained amongst his friends in big media.
This is kinda nonsensical for a site like blogacause, considering that I designed and programmed this site to intentionally not store, process or in any way make known to anyone who a blogger is or who a reader of a blog is in any way. I did this because I know that people need a place to blog from anonymously without fear of reprisal from other individuals or even our benevolent government.
I do have targeted ads, but they are not targeted to the consumer/reader, instead they are targeted to the content being read. I also use google analytics, which tells me where my readers are from and how they got here, such as if the clicked on a link on another site or thru a google search, and this info only provides for a general sense of the visitor, for example, 4 blog readers read a specific article here-in and they were from Florida. There is no personally identifiable information about those readers, not where they live, not their IP addresses, nothing about them personally.
If google began to collect and give me that information I would stop using google because frankly, thats intrusive and its something I've long fought against. It also would not surprise me google already does this but does not provide that info. Do consider that google was funded as a start-up by the NSA and the CIA.
So, in short, I'm keeping an eye out for this thug Rep in congress, to make sure he doesn't try to erode our free speech further.
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"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression." -- Thomas Jefferson
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The Government's Plan To Kill Independent Web Sites