90 Miles From Tyranny : 2012-12-23

The Irishman isn't the only one who got a Holster for Christmas

My Fobus Paddle for my Glock 19 is one one the things I got for Christmas, I also got the Glock Peltor Hearing Protector Muffs (not pictured)


The Irishman also got a holster here:
http://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2012/12/yea-my-christmas-present-came.html

The Demise of the Home Phone


The CDC reports that more than one third of American homes are now landline-free, with six in ten adults aged under 30 living in households with only wireless phones.

Pirate radio jammed keyless car entry systems


3:38 p.m. EST, December 28, 2012
It was a mystery no one could solve — until now.
For months, dozens of people could not use their keyless entry systems to unlock or start their cars whenever they parked near the Hollywood Police Department. Once the cars were towed to the dealers, the problem miraculously disappeared.

Police have since cracked the case.
Turns out the problem wasn't with the cars, the batteries or even user error, but an illegal pirate radio station that was jamming the signal from keyless entry systems of several makes of cars, including Lexus and Toyota. The man behind the bootleg operation likely had no idea it would lock people out of their cars, police say.
Lynn Jacobson, who lives on Van Buren Street a mile west of police headquarters, was frustrated for months trying to get into her car.

"It was happening every day," Jacobson said. "We were getting desperate. It got to where every time I went out to the car I'd say, 'Please let it open.'"
Detectives are still searching for the man who set up the bootleg station on the roof of the eight-story Regents bank building at 450 Park Road, a block north of police headquarters. The station was broadcasting Caribbean music around the clock through 104.7 FM, police say.
If found, the man could be arrested on felony charges and face a fine of at least $10,000 from the Federal Communications Commission.
An undercover detective and FCC agent found the equipment on Dec. 6 concealed under an air conditioning chiller.
Four days after they removed the equipment, a man identifying himself as "Jay" left a message for a maintenance worker at the bank building, police say. When the worker returned the call, "Jay" asked if he'd taken his equipment. The answer: No, but the cops did.
Most people have heard of pirate radio stations blocking legal radio stations. But keyless entry? That's so rare it's only happened once before, two years ago in Miami, an FCC official said.
News of the bootleg radio station stunned drivers who'd initially heard the culprit was an antenna behind the Hollywood Police Department. The problem ended as mysteriously as it began, leaving many wondering how it had been fixed.
"How do you like them potatoes?" said Mannolie Disantos, a manager at a nearby Radio Shack where several stranded car owners flocked when their electronic keys failed, only to learn their key batteries weren't dead after all. "We were blaming it on the police. The police were blaming it on the courthouse. We didn't know what was going on."
The problem began in August, said Jacobson, right afer she purchased her champagne-colored Lexus. She figured she'd bought a lemon.
"At first I thought it was me," said Jacobson, who started to say a little prayer every time she tried to use her electronic key. "It wasn't me. It had to be the car."
Jacobson called the closest Lexus dealership, in North Miami, only to learn other car owners were phoning daily with similar complaints.
"Something mystical was going on," said Jed Jacobson, her husband. "We didn't figure out it was only happening in [our] neighborhood until later."
The dealership told customers it suspected the Hollywood Police Department had changed the frequency of its radio antenna.
Jose Camara, a service manager at Lexus of Pembroke Pines, knew of several customers whose locked cars were towed to the dealership.
"Some people thought their batteries had gone dead," he said.
Managers at the dealerships, saying they couldn't replicate the problem, sent owners home without a fix.
Most drivers were forced to read their owner's manual to learn how to access their manual key, Camara said.
Cars made by Ford, Lexus, Toyota, BMW and Mercedes reportedly were affected.
Despite the threat of hefty fines, pirate radio stations continue to crop up throughout South Florida, said Rob Frailing, a ham radio expert from Cooper City.
In February, the FCC slapped Robens Cheriza with a $20,000 fine after he ignored the agency's warning to stop operating a pirate radio station in West Palm Beach.
Last year, Fort Lauderdale resident Whisler Fleurinor was fined $20,000 for running a bootleg radio station on 99.5 FM.
Mercius Dorvilus, of North Lauderdale, was arrested in 2011 after deputies caught him operating a pirate station that broadcast Haitian music on 92.7 FM.
"People want their own music to be played on the radio, so they set up their own radio station," Frailing said. "I think most people do it because they want to be a DJ and they want to be heard. We have it happen a lot here. We have a lot of people from other parts of the world who don't realize they can't do this. It's a crime."

Test Driving the Apocalypse

On December 21, instead of waking up to fire and brimstone, I woke up and read Mitch Horowitz's “Once More Awaiting 'The End.'” Horowitz looks at our apocalypse fetish and sees a society so jaded with the present it dreams of a break from routine, even if that break is a disaster. He also points out that, as we daydream about crisis, we are doing remarkably little to address real—literally real—issues. I like Horowitz's analysis, but there is more to our fixation on zombies, Mayan calendars, and novels about the Rapture than a desire to escape ourselves.

Behind much of the apocalypse talk and the questionably-ironic zombie preparation classes at REI is a sense that something fundamental is out of balance. It may be impossible to articulate but, on a low level, we feel a sense of disquiet.

I began thinking about disquiet as I was working on two sprawling radio projects. After recording long conversations with nearly four hundred strangers about the past and present, I began to hear a common refrain rise out of the clamor: the future was scary. Nobody could agree on the cause, but they shared a narrative structure.


Trespass. Punishment. Redemption—maybe.

The trespass could be anything from capitalist excess to withering family values, but in both cases, it resulted from hubris. Punishment always came in the form of collapse, whether environmental or economic, abrupt or incremental. If the story continued, redemption could look like a Norman Rockwell painting, Star Trek, or a massively depopulated planet of sustainable farms.

If I had been seeking our common humanity, I found it in a primal sense that we are about to enter the punishment phase.

It was tempting to dismiss the disquiet about the future as a timeless part of human nature. Maybe, as Horowitz suggests, it came from our desire for an external event to unleash personal change. Or as a reaction against living in a world of constant change. We could even chock it up to our myths. From Genesis to Prometheus, Greek legend to Hollywood extravaganza, we have a long, masochistic love affair with the narrative of overreach and punishment. This is, after all, the same narrative that rolls Cassandra out of bed in the morning, generation after generation, and she's usually wrong.

Usually.

But this nagging doubt made me take the disquiet seriously. The Americans I met were level-headed, not Cassandra-like. For them, anxiety stemmed less from feeling personally stifled than from a belief that the biggest systems supporting us were cracking at the foundations. There was a consensus that the economy was rigged, money had eroded the democratic process, and, for a large minority, environmental problems were escalating. Optimism about personal lives was mirrored by pessimism about broader change.

It is easy to say that every historical moment is unique and people always feel they inhabit pivotal moments. This is true in many ways, but attributing the disquiet to biology or psychology drags our moment outside of history and prevents us from seeing fundamentally new issues when they arise. We are more interconnected than at any point in the past and our tower of seven billion is propped up by a frail scaffolding of man-made and natural systems. As individuals, we are dwarfed less by God and Nature than by the immense scale and inertia of our own civilization. The stakes are high, the responsibility is ours alone and, perhaps for the first time, we're starting to feel it.

The Mayan calendar did not resonate because most people expected an irate Mesoamerican god to knock on the front door with a jaguar hat and a flamethrower. Instead, collapse fantasies are an excuse to confront a visceral fear that, back in reality, we have created a civilization too complex to pilot and with limited time before it strikes the rocks.

Gloomy fatalism is useless, but our apocalypse fetish could be like the strange behavior of an animal sensing the first shivers of an earthquake. If we only seek explanations within and frame our behavior as timeless, we risk overlooking problems in the world we have created outside.


-Aengus Anderson

Michelle Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Clinton and Rachel Maddow were all nominated for the same Grammy Award.

I say put them all in a cage match and the one that comes out alive gets the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album.

Only extreme leftists can speak apparently, or perhaps get nominated for a Grammy award.

The nominations were announced in early December.

A number of politicians have been nominated and subsequently won Grammy Awards in this category before. President Barack Obama won in 2008 with his book "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream." He also won in 2006 with his book "Dreams From My Father."

Clinton picked up the prestigious award one year earlier—in 2005—with his book "My Life." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also won in this category in 1997 with her book "It Takes A Village."


It looks like it is Moochelles turn but the left must really be torn, can't they just give them all awards, just because they all clearly deserve it.  They are all leftist ideologues that tow the leftist line. 

The 2013 Grammy Awards will take place on Feb. 10 on CBS.

Zen and the Art of Channeling my Inner Boy

My Inner boy needed to be stimulated so I bought myself a beginner bow. A Barnett Sportflight Recurve Archery Set from Amazon for 40 bux delivered. It has only a 25 pound draw weight but it is perfect for a beginner like me. I bought an extra three arrows so now I have a total of five arrows. This is it in my dining room. I used the box it came in and filled it with other boxes filled with styrofoam and it is working well for target practice for now. If I stand in my living room, I get a distance of a good 30 feet and I don't have to worry about going outside and scaring my neighbors. I have yet to pierce any furniture, walls or patio blinds. The bow stands almost 5 feet tall. I'm having fun with it, but it is scaring my daughters cat whom I am currently babysitting while she is out of town. 
There does seem to be some heated controversy on Amazon comments about whether or not this is a recurve bow or a long bow. I could give about two shits.

It makes arrows fly through the air really fast and pierces things. Cool!


One day when I grow up, I'm gonna take my bow out to the everglades and I'm gonna go gator huntin'!

Man Thought: I think I need a permit for that...

Gun Control Texas Style!

 


Last Thursday night around midnight, a woman from Houston , Texas was ...arrested, jailed, and charged with manslaughter for shooting a man 6 times in the back as he was running away with her purse. 

The following Monday morning, the woman was called in front of the Arraignment Judge, sworn-in, and asked to explain her actions. 

The woman replied, "I was standing at the corner bus stop for about 15 minutes, waiting for the bus to take me home after work. I am a waitress at a local cafe. I was there alone, so I had my right hand on my pistol in my purse hanging on my left shoulder. All of a sudden I was spun around hard to my left. As I caught my balance, I saw a man running away with my purse. I looked down at my right hand and saw that my fingers were wrapped tightly around my pistol. The next thing I remember is saying out loud, "No Way Punk! You're not stealing my pay check and tips." I raised my right hand, pointed my pistol at the man running away from me with my purse, and started squeezing the trigger of my pistol. 

When asked by the arraignment judge, "Why did you shoot the man 6 times? The woman replied under oath, "Because, when I pulled the trigger the 7th time, it only went click." 

The woman was acquitted of all charges. She was back at work the next day! That's Gun Control, Texas Style

Hat Tip:
http://politicalrisktoday.blogspot.com/

I Love IT! (and she is a hottie!)

Response to Wirecutter's Post - Chronically unemployed - I wonder why?

Unemployed Tattoo Klownz
I've been saving this picture for a while, hoping it would come in handy...

A response to wirecutters post here:
http://ogdaa.blogspot.com/2012/12/chronically-unemployed-i-wonder-why.html

Hot Pictures of Hot Girls with Loaded Handguns

Morning and all is well..
 
 
More Hot Girls with handguns, shotguns, rifles and boomsticks:
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_4.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_3672.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_19.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/carmen-electra-with-weapons.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_16.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_898.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_3873.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_7065.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_6647.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_15.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_9942.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/women-with-weapons_6735.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/09/women-with-weapons_30.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/hot-girls-with-big-guns.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/rule-5-girls-with-guns-hot-hot-girls.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/hot-girls-with-machine-guns.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/red-hot-girls-with-guns.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/hot-girls-with-guns.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/hot-pics-of-hot-girls-with-big-guns.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/smoking-hot-girls-with-guns.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/hot-girls-hot-guns-rule-5-girls.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/hot-christmas-girls-with-guns-rule-5.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/hot-girls-with-cool-guns-on-hot-beaches.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/hot-girls-with-hot-guns.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/hot-pics-of-hot-girls-with-cool-guns_23.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/hot-guns-held-by-hot-girls-in-cool.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/12/beautiful-bikini-bombshells-with.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/09/women-with-weapons.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/09/girls-with-guns.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/10/women-with-weapons_23.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/10/women-with-weapons_10.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/10/women-with-weapons_7.html
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/11/women-with-weapons_1688.html

Darpa's Unmanned Drone Sub Hunter

 
DARPA autonomous surface vessel to track and follow enemy subs for months

The growing number of adversaries able to build and operate quiet diesel electric submarines is a national security threat that affects U.S. and friendly naval operations around the world. To address this emerging threat, DARPA recently awarded a contract for Phases 2-4 of its Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program to Science Applications International Corporation, McLean, Va.

During Phases 2-4 the ACTUV program will attempt to design, construct and demonstrate an unmanned vessel that tracks quiet diesel electric submarines for months at a time spanning thousands of kilometers of ocean with minimal human input.

“Key features and technology for the vessel include advanced software, robust autonomy for safe operations in accordance with maritime laws, and innovative sensors to continuously track the quietest of submarine targets,” said Scott Littlefield, DARPA program manager.

If successful, ACTUV would create a technological strategic advantage against the burgeoning quiet submarine threat and reduce manpower and other costs associated with current ASW trail operations.

“Our goal is to transition an operational game-changer to the Navy,” said Littlefield. “This should create an asymmetry to our advantage, negating a challenging submarine threat at one-tenth their cost of building subs. The program also establishes foundational technologies for future unmanned naval systems.”

During Phase 1 the program refined and validated the system concept, completing risk reduction testing associated with submarine tracking sensors and maritime autonomy. Operational prototype at-sea testing is expected in mid-2015.

With Obama's Approval, Congress Extends FISA Wireless Wiretapping Act To 2017

With the Blessing of Barack Husein Obama, the Senate on Friday reauthorized for five years broad electronic eavesdropping powers that legalized and expanded the warrantless wiretapping program.

Barack Obama said: “Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay.”

 
 

The
FISA Amendments Act, (.pdf) which was expiring Monday at midnight, allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted “to acquire foreign intelligence information.”


The
House approved the measure in September. President Barack Obama, who said the spy powers were a national security priority, is expected to quickly sign the package before the law expires in the coming days. In the House, the package passed 301-118 and it passed the Senate on a 73-23 vote.

The controversial bill, which allows federal agencies to eavesdrop on communications and review email without following an open and public warrant process, has long been a target for privacy and rights groups such as the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, which is involved in a Supreme Court case over FISA.

The FISA Amendments Act gives the government nearly carte blanche spying powers.

After Obama signs the legislation, the spy powers and warrantless wiretapping program won’t expire until December 31, 2017.


As our rights and liberties erode and the reach of government expands and intrudes into our lives, liberties and the pursuit of happiness, there must be somewhere that we take a stand, we need to start asking our politicians how they will vote on these issues BEFORE we elect them.

Deep Thoughts..

There is something wonderful about a lighthouse.  Strong, individualistic, self-sufficient, reliable, there for you if you experience stormy weather.  It is comfort, warmth, safety and it is light.  It would benefit the country if more people were like lighthouses. 

Friday, December 28, 2012

We Are The Clarion Call

We are the Clarion Call, We are the New Media!

The old media is dying a slow but steady death.  Who will fill the void?  The time is now to win the hearts and minds of the disenchanted left, the low information citizenry, the undecided, the wavering, the disenfranchised, the unemployed, the discouraged and the future generations.  But how? 

The old days of left wing media hegemony are waning as the new media becomes the dominant force.  There is now true competition for news, ideas and solutions.  We must win and dominate the competition with free market ideas and superior content.  The competition for ideas must be waged on several fronts.  We need content creators, film makers and free market artists to disseminate the message in a context that is appealing to the at risk population.  The right has spent millions of dollars on failed elections, we need to start by injecting free market ideas into the culture, we need to educate the population that left wing politics is failed ideology.  The money needs to start going to funding blogs, free market artists and movie projects.  I'm sick of seeing a picture of a Republican president over the desk of every bad guy in nearly every movie ever made.  Bad guys should always have Democrat presidents hanging over their desks and the message should always be that the left and left wing ideas are bad.  The most common bad guy in movies today is an American right wing politician.  It is amazing to me that the easiest bad guys are never used, like communist governments and Islamic terrorism. The leftist mantra of evil right wing must be supplanted with the truth, that is is the left that is the problem in America and the world.  Let us begin this process.

Are you Talking to Me?


They really had a way with words in the 50's....bitch.

Bug Out Location Porn






It doesn’t get much more remote than this far-flung cabin in Luther, MT that hugs a ridge of Sheep Mountain, overlooking the canyon beneath it. The secluded cliff top getaway offers a modest two-bedroom, two-bath living space, but boasts an incredible 110-acre lot with world-class views. .

INSANE!

Legal Immigration is good for America.  ALL immigration that is not legal is a criminal act.  Let's stop giving our money and treasure to people who do not respect our laws.  Rewarding illegal immigration promotes illegal immigration.

CALEA Is Watching YOU!

Eric Holder, his Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Obama administration want to expand existing CALEA laws to require all services that enable communications including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

CALEA, the (Communications Assistance Law Enforcement Act) current mandates that telecommunications companies provide back doors in electronic devices to allow law enforcement surveillance.

Today with warrant-less wiretaps, this means the Feds could be watching in and listening in to your connected devices, including your TV, DVD Player, Laptop, On-Star, iPad, Cellphone and more. You name it, if they can get to it, they can listen in to watch and listen to your activities remotely.


You think your laptop is asleep?  How do you know the camera is not monitoring you as you undress, booger or scratch your behind?   Your TV has a camera or a microphone?  Then your living room or bedroom is available to the FEDS AND to hackers who will sell your private intimate acts online.

Do you have a device with GPS?  Do you think when it is turned off, it is really turned off?


Big Brother is here. Your Liberty and Privacy is forfeit.  Be aware. Just be aware.


  

Hubble Goes Extremely Deep

Hubble Goes Extremely Deep

Like photographers assembling a portfolio of their best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of our deepest-ever view of the Universe. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining ten years of NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations taken of a patch of sky within the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full Moon.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over one million seconds of observation, the resulting image revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the Universe ever taken at that time.

The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive than the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, thanks to the additional observations, and contains about 5,500 galaxies, even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness that the unaided human eye can see.

Magnificent spiral galaxies similar in shape to the Milky Way and its neighbor the Andromeda galaxy appear in this image, as do large, fuzzy red galaxies in which the formation of new stars has ceased. These red galaxies are the remnants of dramatic collisions between galaxies and are in their declining years as the stars within them age.

Peppered across the field are tiny, faint, and yet more distant galaxies that are like the seedlings from which today’s magnificent galaxies grew. The history of galaxies — from soon after the first galaxies were born to the great galaxies of today, like the Milky Way — is laid out in this one remarkable image.

Hubble pointed at a tiny patch of southern sky in repeat visits made over the past decade with a total exposure time of two million seconds.More than 2000 images of the same field were taken with Hubble’s two primary cameras: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3, which extends Hubble’s vision into near-infrared light. These were then combined to form the XDF.

“The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, principal investigator of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2009 (HUDF09) program.

The Universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The early Universe was a time of dramatic birth for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars far brighter than our Sun. The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a time tunnel into the distant past when the Universe was just a fraction of its current age. The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang.

Before Hubble was launched in 1990, astronomers were able to see galaxies up to about seven billion light-years away, half way back to the Big Bang. Observations with telescopes on the ground were not able to establish how galaxies formed and evolved in the early Universe. Hubble gave astronomers their first view of the actual forms of galaxies when they were young. This provided compelling, direct visual evidence that the Universe is truly changing as it ages. Like watching individual frames of a motion picture, the Hubble deep surveys reveal the emergence of structure in the infant Universe and the subsequent dynamic stages of galaxy evolution.

The planned NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (Webb telescope) will be aimed at the XDF, and will study it with its infrared vision. The Webb telescope will find even fainter galaxies that existed when the Universe was just a few hundred million years old. Because of the expansion of the Universe, light from the distant past is stretched into longer, infrared wavelengths. The Webb telescope’s infrared vision is ideally suited to push the XDF even deeper, into a time when the first stars and galaxies formed and filled the early “dark ages” of the Universe with light.

Image: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team [high-resolution]

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Congress tweaks US video-privacy law so Netflix can get on Facebook

It looks like Netflix will finally manage to get the small change to US privacy law that it's been seeking for nearly two years now. Last night, the Senate passed a reform to the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA, that Netflix says it needs in order to integrate its services with Facebook.
Right now, the VPPA stops anyone's movie-rental history from being disclosed without specific written consent. Netflix expressed to its shareholders back in July 2011 [PDF] that the VPPA made it "ambiguous" how it could get consent from US users to allow a sharing function on Facebook. Given that online privacy has been a growing area of litigation in the past few years, the concern was warranted.
The reform bill that just passed, H.R. 6671, should clear up Netflix's concerns as well as those of other streaming-video providers that want to reach out to your inner over-sharer. It also shows the contours of what a Netflix sharing function, on Facebook or otherwise, might look like. The bill makes clear that: 1) consent for sharing video-watching history can be granted over the Internet; and 2) consent can be given for a whole period of time, up to two years, and doesn't need to be given every time sharing happens. It also specifies that the disclosure has to be in a "distinct" form. In other words, don't put it in the fine print. Consumers will be allowed to withdraw consent for sharing when they want to, on a case-by-case basis, or altogether.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) originally attached VPPA reform to a much larger bill that would force law enforcement to get warrants before snooping on e-mail, a change to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act long sought by privacy advocates. However, the video-rental-privacy part, which is relatively non-controversial, was stripped out of the ECPA bill so that it could be passed quickly according to Politico's Morning Tech (no link available).
The VPPA is something of an oddity in US law. It was passed after the 1988 US Senate debate over the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork, who failed to get Senate approval to join the high court, passed away earlier this week.
During the hearings, a reporter from Washington DC's alt-weekly City Paper acquired the nominee's video-rental history from Bork's local video store, and published a story based on his selections.
Bork's movie-watching predilections were completely unremarkable. They included 12 Alfred Hitchcock flicks; solid Americana like On the Town, The Wild Bunch, and The Right Stuff; and British costume dramas such as The Private Life of Henry the Eighth.
The story got Congress' attention, though. It resulted in the passage of the VPPA, one of the most thorough privacy laws passed by the federal government. Violating the VPPA entails penalties of up to $2,500 per offense.
Now that Netflix can be sure it won't run afoul of such penalties, we can all look forward to a Facebook newsfeed full of friends who broadcast every episode of television they watch.