The AP has a report out about people who are being intimidated by inmates through social media, most notably, Facebook. It appears that inmates are using Facebook to harass and intimidate the victims of their crimes as well as the witnesses to those crimes.

Some victims and witnesses are very upset and scared that those who are in jail could use Facebook to get information that would help them or their surrogates to attack them. The information on Facebook, the pictures, the location information and the large amount of data that FB seems unable to keep secure (and often deliberately releases) is great intel for people who will soon leave prison or who have friends on the outside who can attack the innocent.

Why do criminals have access to computers that are connected to the Internet? Why, for that matter, do they even have access to computers? It is bad enough that we allow them to have cable TV with a zillion channels but now they have access to computers and the Internet. Unbelievable.

Some of the problem, it seems, is that inmates use cell phones that have been smuggled in to access the Internet. How do people sneak phones into the jail? Certainly the guards could sneak them in so they should be searched when they enter. If they get caught sneaking a cell phone in then they should get six months in jail and lose their job.

People who smuggle a phone in and get caught should be sent to jail for six months and be denied permission to visit inmates. Inmates caught with cell phones should have six months added to their sentences, be put in solitary for a month and have their privilege to get visitors suspended for six months.

Make it tough for all concerned. I am all for the prisons installing the cell phone jammers and other technologies to keep cell phones from sending or receiving.

Any inmate caught harassing people through social media (or in any other fashion) should receive even more stringent punishment.

Keep in mind that the jails are secured facilities and that they are supposed to keep things from coming in or going out without close scrutiny. How are tens of thousands of phones entering these facilities?

Because they are full of the same incompetence that permeates all levels of government.

These are the same kinds of people who will be running your health care…

Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.

Back during the campaign we heard about Obama’s grandmother and how she had cancer and received a hip replacement during her final weeks of life. Obama said it made him wonder about the sustainability of a system where someone with little time left above the ground received this kind of care. Basically, Obama said that we should consider denying care to those who are terminally ill. That might have been an appropriate decision in his granny’s case but that is a decision that should be made in concert with a doctor, not a politician or a bureaucrat.

Obama is now using granny as a prop to try and push his health care agenda. Obama is claiming that anyone who suggests that there will be death panels is just wrong and it is hurtful seeing as how he lost his granny not too long ago. Obama thought it was a waste of money for granny to get a hip but that she is valuable enough to the debate for him to raise her from the dead in order to push his health care agenda.

Obama did not care one bit about his grandmother as she lay dying. He barely took time to go see her and he only spent an hour or so of his vacation visiting with her. Yes, Obama the humanitarian did not spend more than an hour with his grandmother after the medical system wasted money on her by replacing her hip. We are supposed to believe him when he says that he has no intention of pulling the plug on granny when he showed little interest in the health of his own grandmother.

Obama is desperate and is invoking his dead granny to bring sympathy to the debate. Demonizing those opposed has not worked. Claiming the protesters are Astro turf plants has not worked. Claiming that the protesters do not represent America has not worked so the only thing left is to raise granny from the dead in an attempt to convince people that the elderly hold a special place in the hearts of the left and will not be coerced into choosing death.

It has been a bad week for Obama and his health care plan. He has dropped the public option, he has decided against death panels and end of life decisions and Sarah Palin used her Facebook account to school Obama and show his true colors.

Raising granny from the dead seems to be about all he has left.

I doubt that will work seeing as how she was nothing more than a typical white person who was thrown under the bus long before she died.

” When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another….”
This is the beginning of our Declaration of Independence, one of the seminal documents of the past three centuries regarding government and its powers and limitations over the people government presides over. The other major document, The Constitution, delineates the powers and the limits of those powers the government may impose.

One of the rights the Constitution provides is Freedom of Speech- a “right” the Iranians are really trying to exercise, through networking, the Facebook and MySpace sites, twitter, and text messaging. Because the Iranian government is a totalitarian regime, and seeks to control their people, they have been busy censoring these various messaging mediums as soon as they can.

Luckily for the Iranians, this is tantamount to plugging holes in a dyke with a finger- it won’t hold for long before another hole springs up.

These people are truly brave- here in our country, if you protest, you might be called a bad name- there, you might be shot, or worse. What’s worse than being shot? Would you really want to know first hand? I doubt it- I know that I would not, but these people risk worse than being shot just by protesting their governments stolen election.

Shortly after Neda Agha-Soltan bled her life out on the Tehran pavement, the man whose 40-second video of her death has ricocheted around the world made a somber calculation in what has become the cat-and-mouse game of evading Iran’s censors. He knew that the government had been blocking Web sites like YouTube andFacebook. Trying to send the video there could have exposed him and his family.

Instead, he e-mailed the two-megabyte video to a nearby friend, who quickly forwarded it to the Voice of America, the newspaper The Guardian in London and five online friends in Europe, with a message that read, “Please let the world know.” It was one of those friends, an Iranian expatriate in the Netherlands, who posted it on Facebook, weeping as he did so, he recalled.

nytimes.com

Yep, these Iranian thugs of the government would have gone after not only the people texting and taking videos, but also their families. What a free and fair government they are. This is stifling free speech on a grand scale, over the little matter of a stolen election. Jimmy Carter would have said it was a fair and free election, but Iran is one country where he has not the fortitude to travel to, even if they would let him.

What is truly disheartening, is the fact that despite all of Hussein’s high and  mighty rhetoric on freedoms that he espoused in Cairo, there has not been a statement coming from the White House that could be said to even remotely have a spine to it.

I understand that Hussein has a calculating mind, but it seems that he wants the current regime to stay in power, thus the limp- wristed commentary he has issued. Perhaps he has more in common with the current dictators than first appears to meet the eye. I hope not, but there could be at least a statement of solidarity with all who seek freedom- but nooooooo.

At least the Internet, and all its permutations, make free speech more possible, and not less so, and this is a good thing- now, if only the President might use his personal bully pulpit, employ his freedom of speech, and at least get his butt off of the fence long enough to say something substantial about a peoples struggle for freedom.

Perhaps he could use his powers to Twitter.