302 US Census workers recording GPS coordinates for every residential front door

(1) America's Ten Most Corrupt Capitalists
(2) Freest country on earth? America - The Grim Truth
(3) US Census workers recording GPS coordinates for every residential front door
(4) Door-to-Door visits begin for 2010 Census - "address information, including GPS coordinates"
(5) Star Wars science-fiction "laser blaster" becoming a reality with dawn of the "death ray"

(1) America's Ten Most Corrupt Capitalists

Wall Street's captains of industry and top policymakers in Washington are often the same people. A lot of them get rich by playing for both teams.

AlterNet / By Zach Carter

May 13, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/economy/146819/america%27s_ten_most_corrupt_capitalists

The financial crisis has unveiled a new set of public villains—corrupt corporate capitalists who leveraged their connections in government for their own personal profit. During the Clinton and Bush administrations, many of these schemers were worshiped as geniuses, heroes or icons of American progress. But today we know these opportunists for what they are: Deregulatory hacks hellbent on making a profit at any cost. Without further ado, here are the 10 most corrupt capitalists in the U.S. economy.

1. Robert Rubin

Where to start with a man like Robert Rubin? A Goldman Sachs chairman who wormed his way into the Treasury Secretary post under President Bill Clinton, Rubin presided over one of the most radical deregulatory eras in the history of finance. Rubin's influence within the Democratic Party marked the final stage in the Democrats' transformation from the concerned citizens who fought Wall Street and won during the 1930s to a coalition of Republican-lite financial elites.

Rubin's most stunning deregulatory accomplishment in office was also his greatest act of corruption. Rubin helped repeal Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that banned economically essential banks from gambling with taxpayer money in the securities markets. In 1998, Citibank inked a merger with the Travelers Insurance group. The deal was illegal under Glass-Steagall, but with Rubin's help, the law was repealed in 1999, and the Citi-Travelers merger approved, creating too-big-to-fail behemoth Citigroup.

That same year, Rubin left the government to work for Citi, where he made $120 million as the company piled up risk after crazy risk. In 2008, the company collapsed spectacularly, necessitating a $45 billion direct government bailout, and hundreds of billions more in other government guarantees. Rubin is now attempting to rebuild his disgraced public image by warning about the dangers of government spending and Social Security. Bob, if you're worried about the deficit, the problem isn't old people trying to get by, it's corrupt bankers running amok.

2. Alan Greenspan

The officially apolitical, independent Federal Reserve chairman backed all of Rubin's favorite deregulatory plans, and helped crush an effort by Brooksley Born to regulate derivatives in 1998, after the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management went bust. By the time Greenspan left office in 2006, the derivatives market had ballooned into a multi-trillion dollar casino, and Greenspan wanted his cut. He took a job with bond kings PIMCO and then with the hedge fund Paulson & Co.—yeah, that Paulson and Co., the one that colluded with Goldman Sachs to sabotage the company's own clients with unregulated derivatives.

Incidentally, this isn't the first time Greenspan has been a close associate of alleged fraudsters. Back in the 1980s, Greenspan went to bat for politically connected Savings & Loan titan Charles Keating, urging regulators to exempt his bank from a key rule. Keating later went to jail for fraud, after, among other things, putting out a hit on regulator William Black. ("Get Black – kill him dead.") Nice friends you've got, Alan.

3. Larry Summers

During the 1990s, Larry Summers was a top Treasury official tasked with overseeing the economic rehabilitation of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. This project, was, of course, a complete disaster that resulted in decades of horrific poverty. But that didn't stop top advisers to the program, notably Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, from getting massively rich by investing his own money in Russian projects while advising both the Treasury and the Russian government. This is called "fraud," and a federal judge slapped both Shleifer and Harvard itself with hefty fines for their looting of the Russian economy. But somehow, after defrauding two governments while working for Summers, Shleifer managed to keep his job at Harvard, even after courts ruled against him.

That's because after the Clinton administration, Summers became president of Harvard, where he protected Shleifer. This wasn't the only crazy thing Summers did at Harvard—he also ran the school like a giant hedge fund, which went very well until markets crashed in 2008. By then, of course, Summers had left Harvard for a real hedge fund, D.E. Shaw, where he raked in $5.2 million working part-time. The next year, he joined the the Obama administration as the president's top economic adviser. Interestingly, the Wall Street reform bill currently circulating through Congress essentially leaves hedge funds untouched.

4. Phil and Wendy Gramm

Summers, Rubin and Greenspan weren't the only people who thought it was a good idea to let banks gamble in the derivatives casinos. In 2000, Republican Senator from Texas Phil Gramm pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which not only banned federal regulation of these toxic poker chips, it also banned states from enforcing anti-gambling laws against derivatives trading. The bill was lobbied for heavily by energy/finance hybrid Enron, which would later implode under fraudulent derivatives trades. In 2000, when Phil Gramm pushed the bill through, his wife Wendy Gramm was serving on Enron's board of directors, where she made millions before the company went belly-up.

When Phil Gramm left the Senate, he took a job peddling political influence at Swiss banking giant UBS as vice chairman. Since Gramm's arrival, UBS has been embroiled in just about every scandal you can think of, from securities fraud to tax fraud to diamond smuggling. Interestingly, both UBS shareholders and their executives have gotten off rather lightly for these acts. The only person jailed thus far has been the tax fraud whistleblower. Looks like Phil's earning his keep.

5. Jamie Dimon

J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has done a lot of scummy things as head of one of the world's most powerful banks, but his most grotesque act of corruption actually took place at the Federal Reserve. At each of the Fed's 12 regional offices, the board of directors is staffed by officials from the region's top banks. So while it's certainly galling that the CEO of J.P. Morgan would be on the board of the New York Fed, one of J.P. Morgan's regulators, it's not all that uncommon.

But it is quite uncommon for a banker to be negotiating a bailout package for his bank with the New York Fed, while simultaneously serving on the New York Fed board. That's what happened in March 2008, when J.P. Morgan agreed to buy up Bear Stearns, on the condition that the Fed kick in $29 billion to cushion the company from any losses. Dimon-- CEO of J.P. Morgan and board member of the New York Fed-- was negotiating with Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed-- about how much money the New York Fed was going to give J.P. Morgan. On Wall Street, that's called being a savvy businessman. Everywhere else, it's called a conflict of interest.

6. Stephen Friedman

The New York Fed is just full of corruption. Consider the case of Stephen Friedman (expertly presented by Greg Kaufmann for the Nation). As the financial crisis exploded in the fall of 2008, Friedman was serving both as chairman of the New York Fed and on the board of directors at Goldman Sachs. The Fed stepped in to prevent AIG from collapsing in September 2008, and by November, the New York Fed had decided to pay all of AIG's counterparties 100 cents on the dollar for AIG's bets—even though these companies would have taken dramatic losses in bankruptcy. The public wouldn't learn which banks received this money until March 2009, but Friedman bought 52,600 shares of Goldman stock in December 2008 and January 2009, more than doubling his holdings.

As it turns out, Goldman was the top beneficiary of the AIG bailout, to the tune of $12.9 billion. Friedman made millions on the Goldman stock purchase, and is yet to disclose what he knew about where the AIG money was going, or when he knew it. Either way, it's pretty bad—if he knew Goldman benefited from the bailout, then he belongs in jail. If he didn't know, then what exactly was he doing as chairman of the New York Fed, or on Goldman's board?

7. Robert Steel

Like better-known corruptocrats Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, Steel joined the Treasury after spending several years as a top executive with Goldman Sachs. Steel joined the Treasury in 2006 as Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, and proceeded to do, well, nothing much until financial markets went into free-fall in 2008. When Wachovia ousted CEO Ken Thompson, the company named Steel as its new CEO. Steel promptly bought one million Wachovia shares to demonstrate his commitment to the firm, but by September, Wachovia was in dire straits. The FDIC wanted to put the company through receivership—shutting it down and wiping out its shareholders.

But Steel's buddies at Treasury and the Fed intervened, and instead of closing Wachovia, they arranged a merger with Wells Fargo at $7 a share—saving Steel himself $7 million. He now serves on Wells Fargo's board of directors.

8. Henry Paulson

His time at Goldman Sachs made Henry Paulson one of the richest men in the world. Under Paulson's leadership, Goldman transformed from a private company ruled by client relationships into a public company operating as a giant global casino. As Treasury Secretary during the height of the financial crisis, Paulson personally approved a direct $10 billion capital injection into his former firm.

But even before that bailout, Paulson had been playing fast and loose with ethics rules. In June 2008, Paulson held a secret meeting in Moscow with Goldman's board of directors, where they discussed economic prognostications, market conditions and Treasury rescue plans. Not okay, Hank.

9. Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett used to be a reasonable guy, blasting the rich for waging "class warfare" against the rest of us and deriding derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction." These days, he's just another financier crony, lobbying Congress against Wall Street reform, and demanding a light touch on—get this—derivatives! Buffet even went so far as to buy the support of Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska, for a filibuster on reform. Buffett has also been an outspoken defender of Goldman Sachs against the recent SEC fraud allegations, allegations that stem from fancy products called "synthetic collateralized debt obligations"—the financial weapons of mass destruction Buffett once criticized.

See, it just so happens that both Buffet's reputation and his bottom line are tied to an investment he made in Goldman Sachs in 2008, when he put $10 billion of his money into the bank. Buffett has acknowledged that he only made the deal because he believed Goldman would be bailed out by the U.S. government. Which, in fact, turned out to be the case, multiple times. When the government rescued AIG, the $12.9 billion it funneled to Goldman was to cover derivatives bets Goldman had placed with the mega-insurer. Buffett was right about derivatives—they are WMD so far as the real economy is concerned. But they've enabled Warren Buffett to get even richer with taxpayer help, and now he's fighting to make sure we don't shut down his own casino.

10.  Goldman Sachs
No company exemplifies the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington more than Goldman Sachs. The four people on this list are some of the worst offenders, but Goldman's D.C. army has includes many other top officials in this administration and the last.

White House:
Joshua Bolton, chief of staff for George W. Bush, was a Goldman man

Regulators:

Current New York Fed President William Dudley is a Goldman man

Current Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler has been a responsible regulator under Obama, but he was a deregulatory hawk during the Clinton years, and worked at Goldman for nearly two decades before that.

A top aide to Timothy Geithner, Gene Sperling, is a Goldman man

Current Treasury Undersecretary Robert Hormats is a Goldman man

Current Treasury Chief of Staff Mark Patterson is a former Goldman lobbyist

Former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt is now a Goldman adviser

Neel Kashkari, Henry Paulson's deputy on TARP, was a Goldman man

COO of the SEC Enforcement Division Adam Storch is a Goldman man

Congress:

Former Sen. John Corzine, D-N.J., was Goldman's CEO before Henry Paulson

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., was a Goldman Vice President before he ran for Congress

Former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., now lobbies for Goldman

(2) Freest country on earth? America - The Grim Truth

From: WVNS <ummyakoub@yahoo.com> Date: 11.05.2010 07:41 PM

America - The Grim Truth

By Lance Freeman

Information Clearing House

5-2-10

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you'd be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don't believe for a second that rot about America having the world's best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I've been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the "good" hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.

Let's start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it's not just the food that's killing you, it's the drugs. If you show any sign of life when you're young, they'll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you'll get depressed, so they'll give you Prozac. If you're a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you'll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you'll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you'll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you'll need Lunesta to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can't take one. I'll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you'll probably be the only American in sight. And you'll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they're paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time to get on a plane and rush back to your job.

If you think I'm making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation days by country:

Finland: 44
Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18
USA: 12

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren't secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They'll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they'll get rid of you.

Of course, you don't have any choice in the matter: the system is designed this way. In most countries in the developed world, higher education is either free or heavily subsidized; in the United States, a university degree can set you back over US$100,000. Thus, you enter the working world with a crushing debt. Forget about taking a year off to travel the world and find yourself you've got to start working or watch your credit rating plummet.

If you're "lucky," you might even land a job good enough to qualify you for a home loan. And then you'll spend half your working life just paying the interest on the loan welcome to the world of American debt slavery. America has the illusion of great wealth because there's a lot of "stuff" around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to leave, you can't, because you've got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you'll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I've got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that's just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don't even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you've never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you're from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn't elect "freedom," then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.

If there was some chance that the country could be changed, there might be reason for hope. But can you honestly look around and conclude that anything is going to change? Where would the change come from? The people? Take a good look at your compatriots: the working class in the United States has been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ass. They've got these people so well trained that they'll take up arms against the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

If the people cannot make a change, how about the media? Not a chance. From Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit. In America, you grow up thinking you've got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you don't think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military spending?

If change can't come from the people or the media, the only other potential source of change would be the politicians. Unfortunately, the American political process is among the most corrupt in the world. In every country on earth, one expects politicians to take bribes from the rich. But this generally happens in secret, behind the closed doors of their elite clubs. In the United States, this sort of political corruption is done in broad daylight, as part of legal, accepted, standard operating procedure. In the United States, they merely call these bribes campaign donations, political action committees and lobbyists. One can no more expect the politicians to change this system than one can expect a man to take an axe and chop his own legs out from underneath him.

No, the United States of America is not going to change for the better. The only change will be for the worse. And when I say worse, I mean much worse. As we speak, the economic system that sustained the country during the post-war years is collapsing. The United States maxed out its "credit card" sometime in 2008 and now its lenders, starting with China, are in the process of laying the foundations for a new monetary system to replace the Anglo-American "petro-dollar" system. As soon as there is a viable alternative to the US dollar, the greenback will sink like a stone.

While the United States was running up crushing levels of debt, it was also busy shipping its manufacturing jobs and white-collar jobs overseas, and letting its infrastructure fall to pieces. Meanwhile, Asian and European countries were investing in education, infrastructure and raw materials. Even if the United States tried to rebuild a real economy (as opposed to a service/financial economy) do think American workers would ever be able to compete with the workers of China or Europe? Have you ever seen a Japanese or German factory? Have you ever met a Singaporean or Chinese worker?

There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline essentially a continuation of what's been happening for the last two decades. Wages will drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico or the Philippines tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the country is already halfway there).

Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight from the US dollar by creditor nations like China, Japan, Korea and the OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting something has to give. If either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the present recession look like a walk in the park.

Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let's face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You've got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You've got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You've got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you've got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is about to become completely unaffordable. And you've got guns. Lots of guns. In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to be.

Right now, the government is building fences and walls along its northern and southern borders. Right now, the government is working on a national ID system (soon to be fitted with biometric features). Right now, the government is building a surveillance state so extensive that they will be able to follow your every move, online, in the street and across borders. If you think this is just to protect you from "terrorists," then you're sadly mistaken. Once the shit really hits the fan, do you really think you'll just be able to jump into the old station wagon, drive across the Canadian border and spend the rest of your days fishing and drinking Molson? No, the government is going to lock the place down. They don't want their tax base escaping. They don't want their "recruits" escaping. They don't want YOU escaping.

I am not writing this to scare you. I write this to you as a friend. If you are able to read and understand what I've written here, then you are a member of a small minority in the United States. You are a minority in a country that has no place for you.

So what should you do?

You should leave the United States of America.

If you're young, you've got plenty of choices: you can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you've already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you've got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can't qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don't let that stop you travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the country of your choice.

You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living outside the United States. Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful, free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us happened upon these lives by accident we tried a year abroad and found that we liked it others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for good. You'll find us in Canada, all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most other countries of the globe. Do we miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States? Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.

In closing, I want to remind you of something: unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren't traitors and they weren't bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn't it time that you continue their journey?

(3) US Census workers recording GPS coordinates for every residential front door

From: Dick Eastman <oldickeastman@q.com> Date: 16.05.2010 02:36 AM

Shock and Awe from Above

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/10917

140,000 workers hired in part with a $700 million taxpayer-funded contract to collect GPS readings for every front door in the nation.

Obama’s Census Bureau had hired thousands of new temporary employees, equipped each with a handheld GPS computer and sent them out to mark GPS coordinates for every residential front door in America.  ... a nationwide GPS grid of coordinate’s markers painted on every private home across the country. But I was having trouble thinking up one good reason for it, even one legitimate use that would justify what must be a very expensive undertaking.  ...

According to one of the Census workers, who spoke with me on condition of anonymity, they must GPS mark the coordinates “within 40 ft of every front door” in America and they are supposed to complete that mission nation wide, within 90 days, by the end of July 2009.

The workers were not told why they were GPS marking every front door. But a supervisor is sent out to follow them door-to-door, to make certain that no door is left unmarked. Every door will be marked by one employee, and then checked by a follow-up supervisor.  ... ACORN signed on as a national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau in February 2009 

The 2% of Americans, who have served military duty at some point in life, are very familiar with the most common use of GPS target painting. The other 98% of Americans might want to pick up a book on the subject, such as

 The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare  …

   The Shape of Things to Come?

 “This is simply a blatant, no possible good reason, invasion of privacy.  God forgive me, but as ex-Navy Fire Control Tech who was responsible for programming and launching the U.S. Navy’s various missiles and gun systems, the first thing that popped into my mind when I read this article, was you cannot program a Tomahawk or Harpoon missile with an address, but you can with a GPS coordinate.”

Enhancing the concerns is the Obama administration's recent decision to put White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in an oversight role over the census, which will be used to determine a reapportionment of congressional seats and could be used to solidify a single political party's control over the nation, its budget, military and future. ==

(4) Door-to-Door visits begin for 2010 Census - "address information, including GPS coordinates"

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/door-to-door-visits-begin-for-2010-census-92508439.html

Door-to-Door Visits Begin for 2010 Census

Census Takers to Follow Up with About 48 Million Households Nationwide

WASHINGTON, April 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- About 635,000 2010 Census takers across the nation begin going door to door tomorrow to follow up with households that either didn't mail back their form or didn't receive one. An estimated 48 million addresses will be visited through July 10. ...

As with all 2010 Census information, address information, including GPS coordinates, is protected by the confidentiality requirements of Title 13 of the United States Code.  All Census Bureau employees take an oath for life to protect identifiable information about individuals and businesses gathered by the agency.  By law, the Census Bureau cannot share respondents' answers with the IRS, FBI, CIA or any other government agency. The penalty for unlawful disclosure is a fine up to $250,000, a jail term of up to 5 years, or both.

Contact: Public Information Office
301-763-3691
e-mail: <pio@census.gov>

(5) Star Wars science-fiction "laser blaster" becoming a reality with dawn of the "death ray"

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2010-05-14-1Adeathray14_CV_N.htm

Are we finally witnessing the dawn of the "death ray"?

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Five decades after the creation of the laser, the ubiquitous technology of the modern era may be ready to serve up that Star Wars science-fiction staple: the laser blaster.

Advances in the technology have made it possible for military testers to shoot down incoming mortar rounds with land-based lasers, and military commanders are on the verge of being able to fire laser blasts from the air that could be aimed at tanks or mines.

"We literally are the invisible death ray, let me tell you," says Mike Rinn of Boeing's Airborne Laser Program in Seattle, a missile- defense effort, one among dozens of Defense Department-supported "directed energy" programs run by military contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.

"This beam is invisible to the naked eye; you can't see it."

'Star Wars' meets reality? Military testing laser weapons

In 2008, a National Research Council Report called for the U.S. Army to speed development of a $470 million "mobile, 100,000-watt solid-state laser weapon system" to knock down mortar shells and rockets by 2018. The 100-kilowatt laser was demonstrated by Northrop in May last year.
...  "Lasers don't do the whole job," says Boeing's Greg Hyslop, a colleague of Rinn's. "But it will complement what we have today." He argues that lasers are faster and more precise than bullets or bombs and can be set to kill or be non-lethal. .../
Reducing "collateral damage" from bombs killing people around targets has emerged as a laser selling point, Hyslop says. In a speech April 21, 2008, Defense Secretary Gates said, "An unconventional era of warfare requires unconventional thinkers, ...
...  Lewis says that is "a real argument" for lasers, which theoretically would pinpoint targets in ways that explosives cannot. "I can tell you people in the military are considering very precise (conventional) munitions, with very proscribed blast radius, for just this reason," he says.
...  "I was more skeptical just three years ago of lasers reaching some of the power levels we see now," Lewis says....
Legal restrictions further weigh down the chances of battlefield lasers, Lewis says. "We can kill 'em, but we can't blind 'em," he says, citing war crime rules that declare it illegal to blind enemy troops.  .