New York Post: Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database

[Wilikon]

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.

So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.

Housing database

The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.

The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.
Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.

HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.

Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.
“By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”

Mortgage database

Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed by former Congressional Black Caucus leader Mel Watt, is building its own database for racially balancing home loans. The so-called National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race, and hold everything from individual credit scores and employment records.

Mortgage contracts won’t be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database. According to federal documents, the repository will include “all credit lines,” from credit cards to student loans to car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects.

The FHFA will also pry into your personal assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your home, as well as your interest rate.

FHFA will share the info with Obama’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias.

The FHFA has offered no clear explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it’s for “research” and “policymaking.”

However, CFPB Director Richard Cordray was more forthcoming, explaining in a recent talk to the radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns.”

Credit database

CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections.

Employment database

CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring all regulated banks to report data on minority hiring to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing expedition.

School database

Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform.

Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms.

Obama’s educrats want to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes.

Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office.

Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist US school system.

Even if no one has complained about discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.

Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society.

The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration.


http://nypost.com/2015/07/18/obama-has-been-collecting-personal-data-for-a-secret-race-database/

[Wilikon]

Obama Nudges Government Toward Better Behavior

Here comes the White House brainwashing that everyone was warning about.


The Obama administration issued an executive order Sept. 15 directing executive agencies and departments to find ways to use behavioral science to change the way people behave — giving them a “nudge” — in an effort to make government function more effectively and efficiently.

That’s a pretty big challenge, but officials say they are encouraged by early results from a White House group launched in 2014 known as the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team.

In one instance, the administration worked with the Health and Human Services Department to prompt applicants who had created an account on the federal health insurance marketplace to complete their application. The officials sent out eight versions of letters to applicants, one of which included a photo of the sender to “personalize the message,” as well as an invitation to the recipient to write down when they expected to complete the application. That letter boosted enrollments by 13.2 percent, while a letter with neither a picture nor a prompt boosted enrollment by just 1.8 percent.

In another effort, at the Agriculture Department, officials created a dialog box that popped up on employees’ computers that asked them to change the default setting on their computer from one- to double-sided printing. The prompt increased the likelihood that people would use double-sided printing by 5.8 percent.

“The social and behavioral sciences are real science — with immensely valuable, real, practical applications — the views of a few members of Congress to the contrary notwithstanding,” John P. Holdren, assistant to the president for science and technology, said at a rollout event.
A House bill (HR 1806) passed in May sliced funds to the National Science Foundation for research in the behavioral, economic and social sciences by 45 percent. The congressman who shepherded that bill through the House, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, made clear his stance on the softer sciences, calling them “lower priority areas.”

In June, the House passed a fiscal 2016 Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill (HR 2578) that would cut social, behavioral, economic and geosciences by 20 percent over current spending levels.

Behavioral science has caught the attention of those abroad as well. In 2010, British Prime Minister David Cameron created what is believed to be the world’s first-ever government “nudge” unit.

President Barack Obama has long been a big fan of the notion. He chose legal scholar Cass Sunstein, a leading behavioral proponent, to helm the White House’s regulatory affairs office in 2009. And in 2012, he reportedly used a group of unpaid academic advisers to come up with ideas on how best to characterize Mitt Romney in ads, as well as fight the false rumors that the president is a Muslim.


http://cdn.rollcall.com/news/Obama-Nudges-Government-Toward-Better-Behavior-243882-1.html?popular=true&pos=hln&cdn_load=true&zkPrintable=1&nopagination=1

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When you sign up to become a US civil servant, do you forgo your human rights?

[vero]

The Post is below a rag as a source of news. But, if Obama is collecting a database, it is to counteract the database the GOP has been creating since at least 2000. I've received at least 5 questionnaires and my primary voting record is online.

[Wilikon]

The Post is below a rag as a source of news. But, if Obama is collecting a database, it is to counteract the database the GOP has been creating since at least 2000. I've received at least 5 questionnaires and my primary voting record is online.

So to counter the evil GOP you need to be more evil?

[Wilikon]

NATIONWIDE ‘SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY’ FILES NOW DOCUMENT SKETCHY ONLINE ACTIVITY


In April 2013, an intrusion at the PG&E power substation in Silicon Valley knocked out local 911 services and cell phone service in the area. A team of gunmen who opened fire at the plant late at night and damaged 17 transformers was to blame.

But an intelligence community program manager warns a hack attack possibly could have had the same effect.

Now, a counterterrorism surveillance program that logs reports of suspicious behavior from spots across the country is also documenting reports of suspicious activity across the Internet.

The Director of National Intelligence in 2008 stood up the "suspicious activity reporting," or SAR, program as a post-Sept. 11 national security initiative. Authorities were trained to monitor for certain behaviors at airports, train stations and large events that might indicate a security threat. Local authorities currently send reports of sketchy behavior to Homeland Security Department-funded, regional fusion centers, where analysts make sense of the narratives.

Today, as physical systems become connected to the Internet of Things, and federal watchdogs warn of plane-hacking, authorities also are filing suspicious online activity reports.

"Just south of San Jose, a high power transformer was shot at by somebody with a rifle, and it caused a power failure," said Kshemendra Paul, program manager of the DNI Information Sharing Environment, in an interview with Nextgov. "That same equipment can potentially be SCADA-controlled over the Internet, or vulnerable to cyber outages, so they need to have an integrated view" of threats, he said, referring to supervisory control and data acquisition systems that control industrial operations.

At fusion centers in New Jersey and Missouri, among other locales, physical security experts are comparing notes with cybersecurity engineers.

"They have crime analysts, cyber analysts, terrorism analysts. They are all working together," Paul said. "Think about it. You have a threat to critical infrastructure: Is it a traditional physical threat? Is it a cyber threat? You want to have an integrated view of the threats and be effectively able to collaborate."

The suspicious cyber activity reporting system is operational, he said. Partners include the DHS National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center and the nonprofit Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center.

"We're talking about dozens to hundreds of analysts that have gone through training” across the networks, at the Secret Service or the FBI," he said. "DHS is sharing lots of products."

Meanwhile, the Senate as early as this week could debate the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, a bill that would make it easier for businesses to exchange, with the government, details about hacks. The data divulged could include customer IP addresses, email headers, timestamps and other metadata that amount to "indicators" of a particular threat -- but also amount to too much personal information in the eyes of privacy advocates.

Civil rights groups generally oppose the cyber information-sharing legislation for this reason. And they have consistently depicted suspicious activity reporting as a tactic that nets more innocents than terrorist leads. In 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the government, arguing the program places people on watchlists for merely taking photos of tourist sites and other harmless behavior.

A 'Flood of Useless Information?'

According to a September 2015 DNI Information Sharing Environment report to Congress, there is a greater need to use tools for sharing cyber information across institutions as malicious digital activity increases. "One such tool is the Cyber Integration for Fusion Centers," a guidebook released in May for state intelligence facilities on how to characterize cyber threats while still protecting privacy.

At fusion centers, cyber information consists of indicators, IP addresses, domains, aliases, and file hashes, according to the guidelines.

Whether a particular cyber suspicious activity report “is linked to terrorism and subject to being shared," depends on how analysts apply their training, the strategy states. Factors that need to be considered in making that call include the targeted IT infrastructure, likely consequences and historical background.

Decisionmaking also takes into account civil liberties.

"The same privacy policies that govern information sharing against terrorism -- work for cybersecurity-related information sharing," Paul said. "That's a big win for transparency" because the rules have been in place for years, and "analysts, operators, and investigators are trained on them. There’re compliance audits and performance metrics."

But ACLU officials seem unconvinced that suspicious cyber reporting will preserve constitutional rights.

“The low threshold for reporting SARs that let loose a flood of useless information on innocent or First Amendment-protected conduct will also result in the reporting of cyber activity that is either innocuous or protected,” said Hugh Handeyside, staff attorney for the ACLU National Security Project. “The targets of those SARs will likely be subject to intrusive surveillance and monitoring, even if the government lacks reasonable suspicion that they are involved in any criminal activity.”

The new tool offers a three-page instruction sheet on how to label the severity of cyberspace incidents.

Some of the directions:

A "significant incident" would be a situation likely to impact public safety, national security, economic security, foreign relations, privacy or public confidence. An "emergency incident" would pose an "imminent threat" to large-scale critical infrastructure, the stability of the U.S. government, or people's lives.
If the target of the threat is a small business, that episode would rank as a low-security level situation, whereas a hack aimed at a United Nations special event would be a high-security level episode.
The defacing of a website or knocking a website offline with a denial of service attack would be of lower consequence than a hack that inflicts damage on the real word or steals data.
Foreign policy issues factor into the description of the attacker. If it is an ally who is compromising U.S. information, that intruder would be called a low-threat actor. A dramatic change in a foreign country's intentions would be considered a high-threat adversary.


http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2015/09/suspicious-activity-files-now-document-instances-creepy-internet-behavior/122414/


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Why is president Bush doing this to us, in 2015?

[Chef Ramsay]

I suspect that whether it's Bush or Obama collecting this stuff via the NSA, it's most likely being warehoused for when the wheels finally fall off this economy and the currency. On one hand, they want to know who the patriots are who have weapons at their disposal or the wherewithal to fight back. On the other, they want to  scope out the dependent classes whom are likely to be a major problem in riots to come when the checks stop coming or are worthless. Just a thought.

[Lenore]

I suspect that whether it's Bush or Obama collecting this stuff via the NSA, it's most likely being warehoused for when the wheels finally fall off this economy and the currency. On one hand, they want to know who the patriots are who have weapons at their disposal or the wherewithal to fight back. On the other, they want to  scope out the dependent classes whom are likely to be a major problem in riots to come when the checks stop coming or are worthless. Just a thought.

Have to agree these are my thoughts as well.   They need the information for something.   This may be it.  If not its for something else.  I am sure we will find out in time.

[Wilikon]

I suspect that whether it's Bush or Obama collecting this stuff via the NSA, it's most likely being warehoused for when the wheels finally fall off this economy and the currency. On one hand, they want to know who the patriots are who have weapons at their disposal or the wherewithal to fight back. On the other, they want to  scope out the dependent classes whom are likely to be a major problem in riots to come when the checks stop coming or are worthless. Just a thought.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/hhs-boosting-nations-stockpile-burn-treatments-case-nuclear-attack