Facebook is scaring me

[Bernice Moore]

http://www.chicagonow.com/the-lowe-down/...-facebook/

[Albert Doyle]

Why would anyone have a problem with such a patriotic organization that kills presidents and other progressive figures, cooperates in a huge shift downward in government with war crimes and torture, and are such nice guys otherwise?


Hopefully we'll have a spring that's been long coming and more than they bargained for. I think it would be poetic justice for them to receive their final notice from the people through their wiretapping...

[Bernice Moore]

Yes they are such Angels.....:bike:

AP Exclusive: CIA following Twitter, Facebook

http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://...tUKmHLB_TA

[Carsten Wiethoff]

From http://i.imgur.com/WiOMq.jpg

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3167[/ATTACH]

[Peter Lemkin]

Ruling Allows US Authorities Unwarranted Access To Any Stored Data

November 18, 2011 by Eric Doyle

A court ruling ordering Twitter to hand over an Icelandic MP's private data has broader repercussions

The WikiLeaks Icelandic saga contined with a US judge ruling that Twitter must hand over the tweets of three Icelandic citizens, including parliamentarian and former WikiLeaks affiliate Birgitta Jonsdottir.

More than this, the Virginia district court judge also ruled that other files, such as social network entries, that are held on US soil could also be accessed by the US authorities without notifying the people concerned.
No US-stored data is secure

The implications are likely to create a shockwave through the online social networking world and could have implications for UK companies that store their business data in US data centres. The precedent has been set for privacy agreements between cloud providers and SaaS to be overruled by law enforcement organisations.

Jonsdottir (pictured) said, "With this decision, the court is telling all users of online tools hosted in the US that the US government will have secret access to their data. People around the world will take note, and since they can easily move their data to companies who host it in locations that better protect their privacy than the US does, I expect that many will do so. I am very disappointed in today's ruling because it is a huge backward step for the United States' legacy of freedom of expression and the right to privacy."

Jonsdottir and co-defendants Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp only found out that the US authorities had requested access to their accounts because Twitter notified them of the court order. In future, companies hosting data may be gagged and prevented from notifying their customers of such privacy breaches.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have represented the defendants in court, has urged other companies to follow Twitter's lead and promise to inform users when their data is being sought by the government, as part of its Who Has Your Back? campaign.

"When you use the Internet, you entrust your online conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to dozens of companies who host or transfer your data," said EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. "In light of that technological reality, we are gravely worried by the court's conclusion that records about you that are collected by Internet services like Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Google are fair game for warrantless searches by the government."

[Ed Jewett]

Time for a yard sale.... "We're moving..."... or maybe it will be an estate sale.

[Peter Lemkin]

Twitter announced today it had perfected a way of censoring any twitter account they wanted to by person, location in the world or content. Hurray for technology in the service of the fascist state security!

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/money/tw...-1.1012804

[Peter Lemkin]

Occupy Wall Street Protester Laughing Off Twitter Subpoena

By Joe Coscarelli


Demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street movement lift a police barricade at Zucotti park in New York, U.S., on Thursday, Nov. 17, 2011. New York police stood prepared for tens of thousands of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators to descend on the Financial District, and ringed the area with metal barricades to deter crowds from reaching their goal of surrounding the New York Stock Exchange. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg via Getty Images

One of the 700 or so criminal cases from Occupy Wall Street's day on the Brooklyn Bridge back in October is against the writer Malcolm Harris, the same guy who takes credit for starting the rumor that Radiohead was performing at Zuccotti Park. Harris, who was charged with disorderly conduct in the march, is now fighting in Manhattan court against a subpoena that demands Twitter provide "any and all user information" related to his account @destructuremal. "This is the legal equivalent of busting a party with loud noise and demanding my phone records for 3.5 months to see if I helped plan it," Harris wrote dismissively.

The New York Times reports:

The lawyer, Martin J. Stolar, filed a Notice of Motion to Quash in Manhattan Criminal Court saying that the subpoena did not comply with federal laws governing requests for information from electronic communications services and remote computing services, and that it failed to comply with procedural requirements for delivering a subpoena to a witness outside of New York State.

In addition, Mr. Stolar wrote, the subpoena was overbroad, issued for an improper purpose and constituted an abuse of the court process.

In his motion, Mr. Stolar wrote that the request for "any and all information" could be interpreted as asking for private messages between Mr. Harris and others, as well as a host of data collected by Twitter, including e-mail addresses and phone numbers used by Mr. Harris, Web pages he has visited and information about his physical location at different times.

In the meantime, Harris appears confident in his case and unconcerned with his public face. "Until an officer actually gets lit on fire, I don't want to hear any nonsense about anarchist violence toward the police," he wrote today from the account. His bio reads, "ALL TWEETS PROPERTY OF TWITTER, INC."

[Keith Millea]

February 07, 2012

Going Public
Facebook Follies

by DEAN BAKER

The big business news last week was that Facebook is going public with an initial public offering (IPO) that is likely to place the market value of the company in the range of $100 billion. This price would put Facebook among the corporate giants in terms of market value.

By comparison, Goldman Sachs, of vampire squid fame, has a market value of $55 billion. Ford's market value is less than $16 billion. With its current market value near $106 billion, Facebook would even give a serious run to Verizon, the giant telephone company.

While the implied value of Facebook is impressive, a question that was raised in several stories was whether the company would really be worth this much money. Some simple back of the envelope calculations show that Facebook would have to gain an enormous share of advertising expenditures over the next 5-10 years in order to generate the sort of profits needed to justify this current price.
Of course that doesn't mean it's impossible; Google went public with a very high market capitalization in 2004. Less than eight years later its stock price has gone up by a factor of six. Someone would want to do some serious homework before ruling out the possibility that Facebook is actually worth its current stock price.

At the same time, there have been numerous cases of companies becoming market darlings when they were most definitely not worth the price. The best example of a failed market darling is probably the Internet giant AOL, which had a peak market value of over $220 billion in 2000. The price tag for AOL today is $1.8 billion.

In the case of AOL, the founders managed to cash out before things went sour. It used its stock to buy Time-Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world. In effect, AOL got Time-Warner to sell itself for nothing, since the value of the AOL stock used in the purchase would soon be a tiny fraction of the value of Time-Warner.

The big losers in that story were the shareholders of Time-Warner, who saw a big hit to the value of their holdings. Needless to say, the executives who engineered the give-away of Time-Warner did just fine, walking away with tens of millions of dollars.

And the top executives at AOL, most notably Steve Case, its co-founder, also did fine. The deal allowed Case to walk away with billions of dollars, making him one of the country's richest people.

Suppose that Facebook ends up looking more like AOL than Google; who would be the losers and who would be the winners? Well, the losers would be the people who jumped on the stock near its peak. If it turns out that Facebook is just an overnight sensation that is either unable to hold onto its market share or to effectively turn its massive social networking franchise into a money making outfit, then people buying its stock near its IPO price will have thrown much of their money in the garbage.

If individual investors knowingly take this risk and end up losing, that is the way markets are supposed to work. Insofar as the purchasers are institutional investors who end up losing money for pension funds, university endowments, or mutual funds in 401(k)s, it will raise serious questions as to whether the managers of these funds were doing their homework or just got caught up in investment fads, as they have so many times in the past.

On the other side we have the early Facebook employees who will walk away with millions, and of course its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who stands to walk away with tens of billions. At a time when there is new attention being focused on inequality and the 1 percent, it is interesting to ask what Mr. Zuckerberg who stands to rank at the very top of the 1 percent has done for his money.
If it turns out that Facebook goes the AOL route, then Zuckerberg will effectively be the P.T. Barnum of the social media economy. He will have succeeded in creating incredible excitement and buzz that led people to voluntarily give him their money for nothing.

The result will be that many people will be somewhat poorer and Zuckerberg will be incredibly wealthy. He will be able to buy whatever he and his friends and family might want as long as he lives. He will be able to promote whatever philosophy he likes (e.g. school reform based on test scores) through charitable donations and political contributions. And, the media will treat him as a person with brilliant insights for the rest of us on how to run the country and live our lives until the day he dies.

This is a process whereby we redistribute money upward to the very rich. In this case, the key actors are highly paid money managers who don't know anything about managing money, just as in the AOL case it was incompetent executives at Time-Warner. In a properly working market economy these people would pay an enormous price for such disastrous incompetence, but that doesn't describe our current economy.

Of course we can always hope that Facebook is really worth its market price.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy and False Profits: Recoverying From the Bubble Economy.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/07/f...k-follies/

[Peter Lemkin]

Ah, but advertising will pale next to revenues selling to government and business [if there be a difference at this point] info and connection details of their victims [members].......:wavey: