danelabonte

A federal appeals court Friday overturned an earlier decision against the federal government’s bulk collection of telephone data from millions of Americans.

The program, struck down in a 2013 federal district court opinion and since altered by President Obama and Congress, was allowed to stand — at least for now — by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The panel sent the case back to district court for further hearings.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled in 2013, in a lawsuit brought by conservative activist Larry Klayman, that the legal challenge to the massive surveillance program — disclosed that year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden — would likely succeed. He issued a preliminary injunction against it but suspended the order to allow an appeal by the Justice Department.

Since then, the program was upheld by a federal court in New York, struck down by an appeals court there, and altered by Congress.

Beginning in November, phone companies will retain the data, and the NSA only can obtain information about targeted individuals with permission from a federal court.

The NSA program now has a 2-2 record in federal courts. In New York, a district judge had upheld it, but a panel of the the 2nd Circuit federal appeals court overturned that ruling in May. It said the program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized” under the USA Patriot Act, which the government said permitted the massive data collection.

(http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/08/28/nsa-phone-surveillance-court/71303750)

The wave of foreign capital flowing into U.S. real estate is poised for a record-setting year.

$24.1 billion estimated, 24% of the market.

Previous high in 2007 was $23.6 billion.

Chinese investors led the way with $1.9 billion in acquisitions during the second quarter, followed by investors from South Korea at $700 million, the United Arab Emirates at $600 million and Canada at $500 million.

(http://nreionline.com/finance-investment/foreign-investment-us-real-estate-assets-hit-record-high)

– ¾ of Americans don’t know where the U.S. gets its oil from

– The U.S. only imports 40% of the oil it uses; the other 60% is produced in the U.S.

– Half of the oil the U.S. imports is from North and South America; only 28% of imported oil comes from the Middle East

(http://www.randalolson.com/2014/08/28/where-the-u-s-gets-its-oil-from)

Mathematician Beth Clarkson has found irregularities in election returns from Sedgwick County, along with other counties throughout the United States, but has faced stiff opposition from the state in trying to confirm whether the irregularities are fraud or other, less-nefarious anomalies.

Analyzing election returns at a precinct level, Clarkson found that candidate support was correlated, to a statistically significant degree, with the size of the precinct. In Republican primaries, the bias has been toward the establishment candidates over tea partiers. In general elections, it has favored Republican candidates over Democrats, even when the demographics of the precincts in question suggested that the opposite should have been true.

Clarkson’s interest in election returns was piqued by a 2012 paper released by analysts Francois Choquette and James Johnson showing the same pattern of election returns, which favor establishment Republican candidates in primaries and general elections. The irregularities are isolated to precincts that use “Central Tabulator” voting machines — machines that have previously been shown to be vulnerable to hacking.

(http://americablog.com/2015/08/mathematician-actual-voter-fraud-kansas-republicans.html)

“There are no secrets, only lazy researchers.”

(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/03/gchq_duncan_campbell)