Fox "News" in trouble? & FBI examining alleged News Corp. phone hacking 14JUL11

THE sleazy practices of "news" corp are not limited to the British press, now it seems the same thing has been going on here. That is why we need a full investigation of the murdoch "news" organization.....

Click here to sign your name: "Please conduct an immediate investigation into News Corporation's activities in the U.S., and makeRupert Murdoch testify before Congress. Staff and executives at News Corporation must be held accountable for any illicitactivities—including possibly spying on 9/11 victims." Sign the Petition!

Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, is in deep trouble.

Reporters at a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Britain hacked into a 13-year-old kidnapping victim's voicemail to get tabloid gossip, even deleting messages to make room for new messages. Their actions led her parents and police to believe she was alive. But she wasn't—she'd been murdered.¹

It appears Murdoch's reporters regularly hacked into the cell phone accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities, and crime victims.² And news just broke that they may have even hacked the phones of 9/11 victims.³ 

It's now clear that it was standard operating procedure at Murdoch's media outlets, that top management knew about it, and that this is just another example of News Corp's corrupt corporate culture.⁴ 

With Murdoch backpedaling, Congress needs to get to the bottom of this scandal—to find out what Murdoch knew and when he knew it—and to hold anyone who broke U.S. law accountable.

Tell the key congressional committees to completea thorough investigation.

The story has been snowballing over the last few days. The newspaper under fire just had to close its doors. And yesterday, Murdoch had to withdraw his bid to take over the largest satellite television provider in Britain.⁵

Progressive groups—including Media Matters, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and Think Progress—have been leading the fight to hold Murdoch accountable. And it's working. 

Some key senators and members of the House have joined the call for an investigation.⁶ And because reporters may have been bribing British police officers, News Corp. may be criminally liable under U.S. law.⁷ Your petition signature will be delivered along with those of other MoveOn and CREDO Action members to keep up the pressure and make sure an investigation happens.

Rupert Murdoch is extremely powerful—in the U.S. alone he controls Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Dow Jones, 20th Century Fox, and dozens of other outlets.⁸ But in America, power should never be able to avoid accountability. 

These are serious charges, and may only be the tip of the iceberg. We need a full and fair investigation to find out if any U.S. laws were broken and to hold the wrongdoers accountable.

Add your name to the petition.

Thanks for all you do.

–Daniel, Michael, Elena, Laura, and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. "Missing Milly Dowler's voicemail was hacked by News of the World," The Guardian, July 4, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=211219&id=28849-17549061-yAQfcDx&t=5

2. "News of the World phone hacking scandal," Wikipedia, Accessed July 13, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=211220&id=28849-17549061-yAQfcDx&t=6

3. "Did News Corp. also hack 9/11 victims' phones?," CBS News, July 13, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=211221&id=28849-17549061-yAQfcDx&t=7

4. "Police told News Corp's Brooks of malpractice: Brown," Reuters, July 13, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=211222&id=28849-17549061-yAQfcDx&t=8

5. "News Corp. Drops Bid for BSkyB," The New York Times, July 13, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=211223&id=28849-17549061-yAQfcDx&t=9

6. "Senators Call for U.S. Probes of News Corp.," Bloomberg News, July 13, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=211224&id=28849-17549061-yAQfcDx&t=10

"King wants News Corp investigation," Politico, July 13, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=211225&id=28849-17549061-yAQfcDx&t=11

7. "Prosecute News Corp.," Slate, July 12, 2011
http://www.slate.com/id/2299038/

8. "News Corporation," Wikipedia, Accessed July 13, 2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Corporation

FBI examining alleged News Corp. phone hacking

By Jerry Markon, Thursday, July 14, 3:26 PM

The FBI has opened a preliminary review into allegations that News Corp. employees sought to hack into the phones of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, according to a source familiar with the probe.
The source said agents are trying to determine if there is a basis for a full investigation and are reviewing materials sent to the FBI by members of Congress and other sources. It is unclear if U.S. law enforcement officials have jurisdiction to bring charges, the source said.
Several U.S. lawmakers called Wednesday for investigations into whether Rupert Murdoch’s British media operations violated U.S. laws.
Following a British newspaper’s report that Murdoch’s London-based journalists had tried to tap into phones of victims of the attacks, Democratic Sens. Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Robert Menendez (N.J.) and Frank Lautenberg (N.J.) urged federal agencies to examine whether any U.S. phone accounts were hacked.
The critics also included the first prominent Republican, Rep. Peter King (N.Y.), who ripped Murdoch’s “yellow journalism” in a letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III requesting an inquiry. King chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security.
The unfolding scandal has imperiled Murdoch’s British operations, leading to the withdrawal Wednesday of his $12 billion offer for the country’s largest satellite television operator, British Sky Broadcasting Corp. But it so far hasn’t touched his much larger and more profitable U.S. holdings.

---

Setting the Spending Record Straight 12OKT10

TOO bad the Wall Street Journal isn't objective enough to call the wealthy Americans who want the government to continue their bush era tax cuts to task for not creating jobs here in the U.S. while they have been receiving these tax cuts during the current economic crisis. Instead they choose to promote the greed that brought about this crisis, and to use their paper to spread the lies and deception of the gop and tea-baggers right before the November elections.
 
The Wall Street Journal today ran an editorial bemoaning the increase in federal spending between FY 2008 and FY 2010.
What it doesn’t factor in, or provide context for, is the chain of events that led to these increases.
First, a large driver of federal spending was the onset of the economic collapse in late 2008 as automatic aid to people hit hard by the downturn, such as unemployment insurance and food stamps, kicked in. With more people temporarily eligible for these mandatory programs and less revenue coming in, the deficit increased substantially in FY 2009, which began on October 1, 2008.  In fact, on January 7, 2009 -- before President Obama was sworn in -- the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued its Economic and Budget Outlook for Fiscal Years 2009-2019. In that document, CBO projected that government spending would rise from 20.9 percent of GDP in FY 2008 to 24.9 percent of GDP in FY 2009.  In reality, government spending in FY 2009 turned out to be roughly what had been predicted a year earlier (24.7 percent). That is to say, this big increase of government spending occurred because of the economic meltdown the Administration inherited and the accompanying automatic increase in programs that assist those most hurt by it -- and this was already fully baked into the fiscal cake when the President took office.
Second, also in response to the recession, we needed to help close the huge gap between what the economy could produce and what it was producing in order to prevent a second Great Depression and even more devastating job losses. That’s why economists from across the spectrum supported a significant stimulus measure, and why the President signed into law the Recovery Act.
While the Recovery Act has become a subject of intense debate, it clearly has brought our economy back from the brink. Instead of four quarters of economic contraction, we now have had four quarters of economic growth. Instead of losing 750,000 jobs a month, we’ve now had nine months of private sector job growth. Recovery Act investments not only saved the jobs of thousands of teachers, firefighters, and police officers, but are also laying the foundation for economic growth in years to come as new roads, bridges, power plants, and rail are built. The Recovery Act added to government spending, but it was essential and beneficial to the nation’s economy.
While measures like these were needed to stave off recession and strengthen the economy, we also must restore fiscal sustainability over the medium- and long-term. However, doing so is made much more difficult because of past fiscal irresponsibility -- the previous Administration’s failure to pay for two large tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
What is required of us now is to make the tough choices to put our fiscal house in order.
The President has put forward a budget that contains more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction. He has put in place a three-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending -- in nominal terms based on levels that do not include any Recovery Act funding -- and vowed to enforce it with his veto pen. He convened a bipartisan fiscal commission to devise a plan to get our budget in primary balance and our country on a long-term, sustainable course, and looks forward to hearing back from them in December. Looking to the long term where the growth of health care costs is the single biggest driver of increased spending, the President signed into law the Affordable Care Act, which will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion in its first decade and more than $1 trillion in the second.
The other side’s response to our fiscal imbalance is to make it worse by supporting tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of households -- cuts that will increase our deficits by nearly $700 billion and do nothing at all to stimulate economic growth.
What should worry those concerned about government spending and our fiscal situation are not slanted arguments about how we got here, but plans like these that will put us deeper into a hole.

Kenneth Baer is the Associate Director for Communications and Strategic Planning at OMB

Every Click You Make 13AUG10 from MOJO

I have no expectations of privacy at my job, after all my employer is paying me to work, not play on the net. I DO expect my personal privacy to be protected and respected when using my cell phone and my computer. I hope Sen. Pryor's legislation is finished and passed soon, it is bad enough the government can access our information through NSLs and other means of monitoring, we do not need anyone else watching and keeping this information. I have also created a separate page for this post on this blog so you can access it at any time and use the tool to check out tracking by websites not listed in this post.

— By Kevin Drum

| Fri Aug. 13, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

— Illustration: 1984 movie prop.

Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a terrific series of stories called "What They Know." The general subject was personal privacy—or the lack of it—in the digital world, and the first article in the series explained how websites routinely track your movements on the web and collect a genuinely astonishing amount of personal information about you in the process. The Journal examined 50 sites using a test computer and discovered that these sites collectively installed a total of 3,180 tracking files—an average of 63 tracking files per site:

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive, the Journal found. Some tracking files can record a person's keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person's social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.
....Some of the tracking files identified by the Journal were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only. They enabled data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.

A full list of the sites they examined is here. The most intrusive were dictionary.com and msn.com, which installed over 200 tracking files each. The least intrusive were craigslist.org and wikipedia.org.
What to do about this? Europe, which generally has better rules than the U.S. regarding the collection and use of personal data, actually has tighter regulations about how long online data should be stored. After all, the local police might want to use it someday. The Christian Science Monitor reports that this is finally provoking a reaction:

Across Europe, a backlash against the storage of private data is growing. Civil society groups like the European Federation of Journalists have criticized the practice, and in Germany almost 35,000 people, including Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, sued their own government over the issue.
"There is a real problem in Europe today. It is a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which says that everyone has the right to a private life. That fundamental right has to extend into digital life," says Christian Engström, a member of the European Parliament for Sweden's controversial Pirate Party, elected on a platform of digital rights.

This tension means that governments aren't always eager to restrict the collection of personal data online. Beyond that, though, there are technical difficulties for those who want to prohibit the practice. When Congress passed the Do Not Call law in 2003, their job was easy: everyone has a telephone number, and all you have to do is put those numbers into a database and tell solicitors not to call them. But there's no equivalent of a phone number in the digital world. Your computer's ID is its IP address, but most IP addresses change regularly. There's no way of creating a "Do Not Track" database and telling online solicitors to keep their tracking files away from everyone who signs up.
Alternatively, as Harlan Yu wrote recently, we could adopt the opposite approach: instead of asking users to register, we could require solicitors to register and then rely on browser settings that would prevent their domains from installing tracking files. Unfortunately, this has technical drawbacks as well, so Yu suggests instead a new standard that would allow your browser to notify every site you visit that you don't wish to be tracked:

The browser could enable x-notrack for every HTTP connection, or for connections to only third party sites, or for connections to some set of user-specified sites. Upon receiving the signal not to track, the site would be prevented, by FTC regulation, from setting any persistent identifiers on the user’s machine or using any other side-channel mechanism to uniquely identify the browser and track the interaction.

This would, of course, require legislation that requires online sites to honor the x-notrack request. That's the bad news. The good news is that whatever the eventual solution, the problem itself is finally getting some attention on Capitol Hill: Politico reported last week that Sen. Mark Pryor (D–AR) is writing a bill "aiming to give consumers more control over their online data....The focus of the bill, which is still in rough draft form, will be giving consumers the ability to opt out of being tracked across the Web." So stay tuned.
In the meantime, the Journal's full package of privacy articles is here, and they're well worth browsing through. It includes pieces that explain web tracking, cell phone monitoring, how much these tracking services know about you, the role of big companies like Google and Microsoft, and even advice on how to avoid tracking. You can't avoid it all, but there are things you can do to minimize it.

 What They Know

The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology.

Marketers are spying on Internet users -- observing and remembering people's clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people's computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com. The Journal also built an "exposure index" -- to determine the degree to which each site exposes visitors to monitoring -- by studying the tracking technologies they install and the privacy policies that guide their use.

Recent Stories

• 
  

  Google Agonizes Over Privacy

• 
  

  The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets

• 
  

  Personal Details Exposed Via Biggest U.S. Websites

Is a site you are interested in not here?

Enter a URL and get more info about its privacy policies:

Search

Powered by

Disclaimer » Download TrackerScan

Install a Firefox Web browser tool to see real-time analysis of the tracking companies that are collecting information on Web pages you visit.