Your cell phone can spy on you…

MSNBC.com had a chilling article recently on how inexpensive spyware programs can allow anyone to spy on you with your cell phone. It’s yet another reason why people should go “off the grid” as much as possible. If it’s this easy for your ex-wife to spy on your every word, imagine what government parasites can do?

Here’s the situation in a nutshell, according to MSNBC.com. Thanks to recent developments in “spy phone” software, a do-it-yourself spook can now wirelessly transfer a wiretapping program to any mobile phone,” the website says. “The programs are inexpensive, and the transfer requires no special skill. The would-be spy needs to get his hands on your phone to press keys authorizing the download, but it takes just a few minutes—about the time needed to download a ringtone.”

This new generation of -user-friendly spy-phone software has become widely available in the last year—and it confers stunning powers. The latest programs can silently turn on handset microphones even when no call is being made, allowing a spy to listen to voices in a room halfway around the world. Targets are none the wiser: neither call logs nor phone bills show records of the secretly transmitted data.

More than 200 companies sell spy-phone software online, at prices as low as $50 (a few programs cost more than $300). Vendors are loath to release sales figures. But some experts—private investigators and consultants in counter-wiretapping, computer-security software and telecommunications market research—claim that a surprising number of people carry a mobile that has been compromised, usually by a spouse, lover, parent or co-worker. Many employees, experts say, hope to discover a supervisor’s dishonest dealings and tip off the top boss anonymously. Max Maiellaro, head of Agata Christie Investigation, a private-investigation firm in Milan, estimates that 3 percent of mobiles in France and Germany are tapped, and about 5 percent or so in Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain. James Atkinson, a spy-phone expert at Granite Island Group, a security consultancy in Gloucester, Massachusetts, puts the number of tapped phones in the U.S. at 3 percent. (These approximations do not take into account government wiretapping.) Even if these numbers are inflated, clearly many otherwise law-abiding citizens are willing to break wiretapping laws.

The article goes on to say that this type of spyware works well on so-called “smart phones” — such as iPhones and BlackBerrys — because they have the processing power.

Government parasites will, of course, outdo private individuals in their use of illegal wiretapping. According to MSNBC, spyware being developed for law-enforcement agencies “will accompany a text message and automatically install itself in the victim’s phone when the message is opened, according to an Italian developer who declined to be identified.”

Big Brother Out of Control: Mom Says Feds Misuse Patriot Act to Violate Constitutional Rights of Citizens

Mom says Patriot Act stripped son of due process
Ashton Lundeby

Oxford, N.C. — Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.

But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.

The family was at a church function that night, his mother, Annette Lundeby, said.

“Undoubtedly, they were given false information, or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats,” Lundeby said.

Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.

“I was terrified,” Lundeby’s mother said. “There were guns, and I don’t allow guns around my children. I don’t believe in guns.”

Lundeby told the officers that someone had hacked into her son’s IP address and was using it to make crank calls connected through the Internet, making it look like the calls had originated from her home when they did not.

Her argument was ignored, she said. Agents seized a computer, a cell phone, gaming console, routers, bank statements and school records, according to federal search warrants.

“There were no bomb-making materials, not even a blasting cap, not even a wire,” Lundeby said.

Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.

Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.

“We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution,” she said. “It wasn’t intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can’t even defend.”

Passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the Patriot Act allows federal agents to investigate suspected cases of terrorism swiftly to better protect the country. In part, it gives the federal government more latitude to search telephone records, e-mails and other records.

“They’re saying that ‘We feel this individual is a terrorist or an enemy combatant against the United States, and we’re going to suspend all of those due process rights because this person is an enemy of the United States,” said Dan Boyce, a defense attorney and former U.S. attorney not connected to the Lundeby case.

Critics of the statute say it threatens the most basic of liberties.

“There’s nothing a matter of public record,” Boyce said “All those normal rights are just suspended in the air.”

In a bi-partisan effort, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., last month introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives a bill that would narrow subpoena power in a provision of the Patriot Act, called the National Security Letters, to curb what some consider to be abuse of power by federal law enforcement officers.

Boyce said the Patriot Act was written with good intentions, but he said he believes it has gone too far in some cases. Lundeby’s might be one of them, he said.

“It very well could be a case of overreaction, where an agent leaped to certain conclusions or has made certain assumptions about this individual and about how serious the threat really is,” Boyce said.

Because a federal judge issued a gag order in the case, the U.S. attorney in Indiana cannot comment on the case, nor can the FBI. The North Carolina Highway Patrol did confirm that officers assisted with the FBI operation at the Lundeby home on March 5.

“Never in my worst nightmare did I ever think that it would be my own government that I would have to protect my children from,” Lundeby said. “This is the United States, and I feel like I live in a third world country now.”

Lundeby said she does not think this type of case is what the Patriot Act was intended for. Boyce agrees.

“It was to protect the public, but what we need to do is to make sure there are checks and balances to make sure those new laws are not abused,” he said.

Obama Administration Seeks to Expand Big Brother’s Monitoring of Private Citizens’ Financial Affairs

Despite the U.S. government’s recent posturing on the issue of foreign bank accounts and tax havens, more than a few retirees are asking a fundamental question: Where in the U.S. Constitution is the Federal government granted the power to know all about our financial affairs in a Big Brother-like fashion?

Like the Feds’ penchant for warrentless wiretaps, this recent attempt to expand surveillance of private citizens strikes many American citizens as patently illegal. At the very least, it may strike a backlash against the Obama Administration’s increasingly totalitarian expansion of government.

Many people maintain foreign bank accounts, not for tax evasion, but for convenience, safety and privacy: They simply don’t think it’s the U.S. government business (or anyone else’s!) to know what they do with their money. Once they’ve paid their income taxes, why should the U.S. government monitor where their money is?

As is well known, the doctrine of enumerated powers found in the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states that “[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Of course, the Feds have gradually ignored the Tenth Amendment through an ever-widening application of the Commerce Clause, the article of the Constitution that grants to the Federal government the right to regulate interstate commerce. Now we are at the point where the Feds believe they can demand that free citizens, living abroad, report every penny they have in every bank account, anywhere in the world, regardless of where that money was earned – or face criminal charges and years in prison. Thanks to the tax-happy Obama Administration and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan) – desperate to raise trillions in new taxes to pay for socialist programs — the Feds are about to create a new slate of laws making the reporting requirements even more onerous than they already are.

But as it usually the case, the Feds’ new crusade against productive citizens will simply backfire. Banks are already reporting record numbers of people withdrawing cash to maintain in home safes. More and more people are choosing to avoid the government-controlled banking system altogether.

Dow Breaks Record of 1929 Crash and Closes Week Down 18.1%!

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The Dow closed down 18.1% for the week — the greatest one-week wipeout in history!

It’s actually worse than the Great Crash of Black Monday, October 28, 1929, when the Dow closed the week “only” down 14.4%.

It’s worse than the 1987 crash when the Dow, after plunging 22% in a single day, closed the week down 13.1%. In the past 12 months, the Dow has lost 40% of its value while the S&P 500 has lost 42.5%. Markets in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are losing just as much, if not more.

The last time the S&P 500 crashed like this, in the aftermath of 9/11, it took FIVE YEARS to finally recover and only with the help of $400 trillion worth of bank-created derivatives.

That money is now gone forever and will never be created again.

We’re now back to where we were a decade ago – only this time, we’re facing MASSIVE government debts… two unresolved wars… a sinking global economy… a global banking system that is collapsing… and the likelihood of a president with ZERO financial or executive experience.


The market will come back. Historically, it always has. But we’re in for a prolonged period of economic uncertainty. Early retirees should use their “off the grid” skills to simplify their lives, relocate to less expensive areas (preferably outside the U.S.) and buckle down.

Big Brother Wants National Fingerprint Database

OpenMarket.org, the blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is one of the few media sources reporting on a new secret plan to create a national fingerprint database of non-criminals, beginning first with loan originators:

Fingerprints are considered to be among the most personal of information, and fingerprint databases created and proposed in the name of national security have generated much debate. Recently, “Server in the Sky” — a proposed international database of the fingerprints of suspected criminals and terrorists to be shared among the U.S., U.K. and Canada — has ignited a firestorm of controversy. As have cavalier comments by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that fingerprints aren’t “personal data.”

Yet earlier this week, a measure creating a federal fingerprint registry totally unrelated to national security passed a U.S. Senate committee almost without notice. The legislation would require thousands of individuals working even tangentially in the mortgage and real estate industries — and not suspected of anything — to send their prints to the feds. The database and fingerprint mandates were tucked into housing and foreclosure assistance bills that on Tuesday passed the Senate Banking Committee by a vote of 19-2.

The measure the committee passed states that “an indvidual may not engage in the business of a loan originator without first … obtaining a unique identifier.” To obtain this “identifier,” an individual is requiredto “furnish” to the newly created Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System and Registry “information concerning the applicant’s identity, including fingerprints for submission” to the FBI and other government agencies.

The fingerprint provisions are contained in a “manager’s amendment” that was hammered out by committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn, and Ranking Member Richard Shelby, R-Ala., on Monday and attached the next day to a broader housing bailout bill that had been scheduled for a comittee vote. That bill, the “Federal Housing Finance Regulatory Reform Act of 2008,” expands the lending authority of the Federal Housing Administration and the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance the mortgages of troubled borrowers and banks.

It’s a chilling reminder of just how far Americans have gone in losing their cherished freedoms. Both Democrat and Republican leaders no longer even pretend to care about civil liberties. You can read the rest of the article by clicking here.