Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, January 13, 2015


Anyone out there who STILL wants to cut my throat... com'on over... now's your chance... I'll even lean back!

 FRIGGIN' SORE THROAT...!!!


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2 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/12/irs-keeps-albuquerque-tea-party-in-limbo-5-years-a/

Before there were the lost Lerner emails, the congressional hearings and the retaliatory budget cuts, there was the Albuquerque Tea Party, a group of politically minded folks in New Mexico who wanted to get together and share ideas for taking back their country.

The IRS had other ideas about them.

* OBAMA'S IRS...

Five years after the Albuquerque Tea Party applied for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, they remain in limbo — their application apparently no closer to being approved or denied than it was the day they mailed it to the IRS on Dec. 29, 2009.

* THOSE RESPONSIBLE SHOULD BE THROWN IN JAIL...

They have watched as other groups have been approved in less time, and they say they are mystified as to why the application has been held up so long, after they provided hundreds of pages of evidence and documents that the IRS requested.

“If the IRS, with its massive staff, read only 1/2 of a page daily of all the paperwork we have had to send them, they could have read it all three years ago,” Rick Harbaugh, secretary of the board of the Albuquerque group, said in an email describing his group’s five-year battle with the tax agency.

* AGAIN... THOSE RESPONSIBLE NEED TO BE CRIMINALLY PROSECUTED.

Worse yet, he said, they still don’t know why they were targeted in the first place, and every explanation from the IRS — that the targeting was by low-level employees in Ohio, for example — has been wrong.

* "WRONG?" "LIES" IS MORE LIKE IT!

Mr. Harbaugh said they have letters from the Treasury Department saying their file was being reviewed in Washington.

Republicans in Congress have vowed to continue investigating the IRS targeting. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, under new Chairman Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican; the Senate Finance Committee under new Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican; and the House Ways and Means Committee under new Chairman Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, all said they remain on the case.

The Finance Committee is awaiting final word from the inspector general about which of Ms. Lerners’ emails have been recovered, while a senior House source said the Ways and Means Committee will begin to look at how the IRS chooses whom it audits. That would expand the tea party probe beyond initial applications for tax-exempt status.

The IRS has assured a federal court that it is no longer targeting, and a judge has agreed. He denied a request from tea party groups to issue an order banning future targeting.

But Mr. Harbaugh said it’s difficult to see how the targeting is over given his own experience.

Mr. Harbaugh said his group filed the paperwork for its application on Dec. 29, 2009. On April 21, 2010, it received a two-page, 10-question reply asking for documents on the group’s activities, including copies of its Web page, newsletters and brochures, and handouts and minutes from meetings.

In November 2011, the IRS fired back with a round of 17 more questions, seeking much of the same data for the two years that had elapsed while the IRS delayed the application. Several other rounds of back-and-forth followed, including the 2013 offer to agree to the 40% rule. The Albuquerque Tea Party rejected that offer and has been waiting ever since.

January 13, 2015 at 4:53 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/president-obama-s-new-cybersecurity-proposal-is-already-facing-skepticism-20150113

Hoping to capitalize on the recent Sony breach, President Obama on Tuesday will unveil proposed legislation that would create a friendlier environment for companies and government to share information about potential cyber-threats and security vulnerabilities.

* HMM... "CAPITALIZE..." ER... "FRIENDLIER ENVIRONMENT?" I'M NERVOUS ALREADY!

The proposal, to be officially announced later today by Obama in a speech at the National Cyber-security and Communications Integration Center, hopes to cajole the private sector into participating in information-sharing by offering them liability protection. The plan seeks to assuage privacy concerns by requiring participating companies to comply with a set of restrictions, such as removing "unnecessary personal information," but a White House fact sheet did not specify what those restrictions would entail.

* THE DEVIL IS ALWAYS IN THE DETAILS (AND MORESO LACK OF DETAILS) WITHIN OBAMA PROPOSALS.

But the package is already facing headwinds from privacy advocates, who for years have cautioned that information-sharing legislation could bolster the government's surveillance powers. Several groups have insisted that no information-sharing bill should be considered before substantial National Security Agency reform.

"The Sony hacks demonstrates a failure of corporate digital security, and not a need for greater government information-sharing," said Amie Stepanovich, senior policy counsel with Access, a digital-freedom group. "The administration's attempt to use Sony to justify increased transfer of information to the government is difficult to understand, particularly in the absence of substantive NSA reform, a subject the administration has yet to comment on in the new year."

* OH... I WOULDN'T SAY "DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND." REMEMBER... "NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE!"

Stepanovich said the White House proposal appears to be an improvement on a controversial cyber-security bill that was reintroduced this week by Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, a Maryland Democrat, but that "the devil is in the details."

(*SNORT*) (*PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK*)

"Instead of proposing unnecessary computer security information sharing bills, we should tackle the low-hanging fruit," said Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "This includes strengthening the current information sharing hubs and encouraging companies to use them immediately after discovering a threat."

Also on Tuesday, the administration will propose that Congress take up legislation seeking to broaden law enforcement's authorities to fight cybercriminals by criminalizing the sale of stolen financial data, among other measures.

It would also allow the administration to obtain court approval to hunt down computer networks that force websites to crash by issuing so-called denial-of-service attacks and amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to ensure that "insignificant conduct" does not fall within the statute's scope.

* AH... YES... COURT APPROVAL...!

January 13, 2015 at 5:10 PM

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