Reports Yahoo:

The seizure was conducted under U.S. civil law, not criminal law. That means the affected parties need to prove that the internet domains were not engaging in illegal activity to get them back — an ugly mirror image of the country’s usual “innocent until proven guilty” right. Many of the domains were not being operated by U.S. groups. Because they used U.S. domain suffixes .net, .com, and .org, however, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was empowered to act.

Visitors to any of the seized domains are now greeted by a message from ICE explaining the takedown. According to the government, these messages have already been viewed over 77 million times yesterday alone.

I see said the blind man. And now…

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you target sites are assumed guilty until proven innocent under U.S. law. Scary.

Reports Yahoo:

1. Federal Reserve and Intragovernmental Holdings

U.S. debt holdings: $6.328 trillion

That’s right, the biggest single holder of U.S. government debt is the Federal Reserve system. The Fed’s system of banks and other U.S. intragovernmental holdings accounted for a stunning $6.328 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt in Spetember 2011 (the most recent number available). The amount is an all-time high as the Federal Reserve continues to expand its balance sheet, partially to purchase U.S. government debt securities. About a decade ago, the total government holdings were “only” $2.5 trillion.

2. China

U.S. debt holdings: $1.132 trillion

The largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities, China currently has $1.132 trillion in American debt, although it is down from all time highs of $1.173 trillion in July 2011. For more on China and currency, see CNBC Explains.

3. Other Investors/Savings Bonds

U.S. debt holdings $1.107 trillion

With the most recent numbers from June 2011, this extremely diverse group includes individuals, government-sponsored enterprises, brokers and dealers, bank personal trusts, estates, savings bonds, corporate and noncorporate businesses for a total of $1.107 trillion. Although the level of debt held in U.S. savings bonds has remained basically constant since 2000, the broad category of “other” investors has nearly quadrupled since reaching a four-year low in December 2007.

4. Japan

U.S. debt holdings: $1.038 trillion

One of the U.S.’s largest trade partners, Japan is also one of the U.S.’s largest debt holders, currently owning $1.038 trillion in Treasury securities.

5. Pension Funds

U.S. debt holdings: $842.2 billion

Pension funds control large amounts of money, reserved for personal retirements, and thus are obligated to make relatively safe investments. This group, which includes private and local government pension funds, holds $842.2 billion in U.S. debt. The private pension fund category also includes U.S. Treasury securities held by the Federal Employees Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan G Fund.

6. Mutual Funds

U.S. debt holdings: $653.5 billion

According to the Federal Reserve, mutual funds hold the sixth-largest amount of U.S. debt compared to any other group, although mutual fund holdings have diminished by more than $105 billion since December 2008. Including money market funds, mutual funds and closed-end funds, this group of investments managed about $653.5 billion in U.S. Treasury securities as of June 2011, which are the most recent numbers available.

7. State and Local Governments

U.S. debt holdings: $484.4 billion

U.S. state and local governments have nearly a half-trillion dollars invested in American debt, according to the Federal Reserve. The level of investment has remained stable since 2006, moving within the range of $484 billion and $576 billion. The current debt holdings, however, represent the lowest aggregate level for state and local governments since December 2005, when they stood at $481.4 billion.

8. The United Kingdom

U.S. debt holdings: $429.4 billion

The U.K. currently holds $429.4 billion in U.S. debt, but the country’s investment has fluctuated dramatically during the past two years. Now at its all-time high (and rapidly increasing), British holdings were as low as $55 billion in June 2008.

9. Depository Institutions

U.S. debt holdings: $284.5 billion

As of June 2011 (the most recent numbers available), the Federal Reserve Board of Governors lists depository institutions as holding about $284.5 billion in U.S. debt. This group includes commercial banks, savings banks and credit unions. In 2011, its holdings more than tripled from the 2008 low of $105 billion. Between June and September 2011, holdings for depository institutions fell by nearly $44 billion.

10. Insurance Companies

U.S. debt holdings: $250.1 billion

According to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, insurance companies hold $250.1 billion in Treasury securities. This group includes property-casualty and life insurance firms.

And now…

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you Wow! I would like to say something profound here but I am at a lost for words.

Reports This is 50:

The device will be able to read a form of natural energy emitted by people called terahertz, and if something is obstructing that energy, the device will highlight that object on a person’s body.

“This technology has shown a great deal of promise as a way of detecting weapons without a physical search,” said police spokesman Paul Browne in a statement.

Some civil libertarians said there may be a potential upside to this new technology.

“If we take the police department at their word, that stop-and-frisks are necessary to get guns off the street, then this technology — if it were to work, if it were to be implemented — should reduce the stop-and-frisk numbers dramatically,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

But Lieberman said the technology would raise other potential civil liberties problems.

‘It does implicate the right of privacy,” Lieberman said. “The ability to walk down the street free from a virtual police pat-down is a matter of concern.”

The police have repeatedly defended their stop-and-frisk practice as an important crime-fighting tool that gets guns off the street.

Browne said the department employs other strategies to reduce the number of illegal guns in circulation, including undercover investigations, gun buy-back programs with the public and partnering with clergy leaders to deter gun violence in minority communities.

But Browne said this technology would allow police to tackle gun violence more aggressively.

The device would be placed in a vehicle and could scan an area for weapons. The police said the technology is currently being tested but so far is only detecting weapons from four feet away. They hope to increase the distance to about 80 feet.

Browne said the department will roll out the new technology as soon as it meets their requirements.

And now…

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

And now…the information Big Brother doesn’t want you to know.

And now…more on the SOPA and PIPA bills:

And now…

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you ask China about the government regulating the internet. PS, get involved and sign the petition by going here.

Reports Yahoo:

To recap a bit of history, the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA is the House version of a previous bill proposed by the Senate, which was known as the PROTECT-IP Act (a name that was an abbreviation for “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property”). That in turn was a rewritten version of a previous proposed bill that was introduced in the Senate last year. Not wanting to be outdone by their Senate colleagues when it comes to really long acronyms, the House version is also known as the E-PARASITE Act, which is short for “Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation.”
Copyright holders win, free speech and an open Internet lose

What it really is, however, is a disaster for the internet. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes in a post on the proposed legislation, the law would not only require ISPs to remove websites from the global network at the request of the government or the courts (by blocking any requests to the central domain-name system that directs internet traffic), but would also be forced to monitor their users’ behavior in order to police acts of copyright infringement. Providers who do not comply with these requests and requirements would be subject to sanctions. And in many cases, legal hearings would not be required. As Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said of the PROTECT-IP Act:

At the expense of legitimate commerce, PIPA’s prescription takes an overreaching approach to policing the Internet when a more balanced and targeted approach would be more effective. The collateral damage of this approach is speech, innovation and the very integrity of the Internet.

In effect, the new law would route around many of the protections in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, including the “safe harbor” provisions (a number of law professors have said that they believe the proposed legislation would be unconstitutional because it is a restraint on freedom of speech). The idea that ISPs and internet users can avoid penalties if they remove content once they have been notified that it is infringing, for example, wouldn’t apply under the new legislation — and anyone who provides tools that allow users to access blacklisted sites would also be subject to penalties.

In addition to using what some are calling the “internet death penalty” of removing infringing websites from the DNS system so they can’t be found, the proposed bill would also allow copyright holders to push for websites and services to be removed from search engine results and to have their supply of advertising cut off — and would require that payment companies like PayPal and ad networks comply with these orders. If you liked what PayPal and others did when they shut off donations to WikiLeaks, you’re going to love the new Stop Online Piracy Act.
Creating a firewall around the internet, just like China

According to Techdirt, which has been a vocal critic of the bill and its predecessors, the new legislation would create a “Great Firewall of America,” similar to the firewall that the Chinese government uses to keep its citizens from accessing certain websites and servers that it deems to be illegal. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick notes that the new bill actually expands the range of websites that could be targeted by the bill: the previous version referred to sites that were “dedicated to infringing activities” with no other obvious purpose, but the new law would allow the government to target any site that has “only limited purpose or use” other than infringement (by the government’s definition).

The bottom line is that if it passes and becomes law, the new act would give the government and copyright holders a giant stick — if not an automatic weapon — with which to pursue websites and services they believe are infringing on their content. With little or no requirement for a court hearing, they could remove websites from the internet and shut down their ability to be found by search engines or to process payments from users. DMCA takedown notices would effectively be replaced by this nuclear option, and innocent websites would have to fight to prove that they deserved to be restored to the internet — a reversal of the traditional American judicial approach of being assumed innocent until proven guilty — at which point any business they had would be destroyed.

That might make for the kind of internet that media and entertainment conglomerates would prefer, but it would clearly be a much diminished version of the internet we take for granted. Opponents of the bill have set up a website to try and convince voters to reject the legislation and tell their congressman not to support it. Embedded below is an interview that Senator Wyden did at the recent Web 2.0 Summit about his views on the PROTECT-IP Act and why it needs to be stopped:

I see said the blind man. And now…

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you sh*t just got real.

And now…

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you the People’s Republic of California doesn’tlike people making profit.

I see said the blind man. And now…

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you Google = Skynet.

EbenGregory was like…this ain’t new. A mobile has to advertise its IEMI number and cell phone number to every base station it connects to so that any calls can be passed through to the cell phone. But you don’t hear me doe.

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you “Phones were built by trolls.” - Charlie Sheen.

EbenGregory was like…here’s what TMZ is reporting:

Lil Wayne had one hell of a greeting party at Opa-Loca Airport in Miami earlier this week — where the rapper was stopped and searched by federal agents after he got off his plane … TMZ has learned.

Law enforcement sources tell us … multiple agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency performed a contraband search on Weezy … who’s currently on felony probation stemming from incidents involving drugs and guns.

But Weezy was squeaky clean — so the agents let the rapper go on his way with no further incident.

I see said the blind man. And now.

The seeking is the goal and the search is the answer ice jewelry. Did you see it?

EbenGregory was like…red pill or blue pill = same pill.

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you we might as well just burn down the houses.

EbenGregory was like…here’s what Gawker is reporting:

House Bill No. 1237, introduced today by Republican State Rep. Hal Wick of Sioux Falls, asks that each citizen residing in the state of South Dakota who has attained the age of twenty-one years shall purchase or otherwise acquire a firearm suitable to their temperament, physical capacity, and personal preference sufficient to provide for their ordinary self-defense.

Sounds like the raddest bill ever, right? And one that would definitely make South Dakota the safest state in the union, partly because everyone would either move away, or die, from being shot.

But, of course, it’s a “stunt” engineered by Wick to, I guess, “prove” that the government can’t require you to buy health care. (Does Rep. Wick know that the federal government and the state government of South Dakota are two different things imbued with different rights and powers? I mean, who does he think requires him to own car insurance? You know what, don’t answer that.) Another promise broken by a politician!

I see said the blind man. And now…

I figured somebody needed to see and listen to this. I even brought my homeboy along because he felt like dancing to the video.

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you that this oughta go over real well with the pacifist Mennonite and Hutterite communities in the state. But you don’t hear me doe.

PS, play the video and watch the kid dance. Trippy sh*t…kinda like this.

EbenGregory was like…here’s what the UrbanDaily.com is reporting:

It is rumored that the popular video site was shut down by the FED(cue dramatic background music). World Star tweeted this statement: “WE WILL BE BACK!!! CAN’T SHUT US DOWN #WORLDSTAR.”

The Internet has been ablaze with question marks about the “shut down” and from the looks of that last tweet it seems like, WSHH will be back just not under their known domain.

When you attempt to go to the site this message comes up: Server not found

I see said the blind man. And now…

Here’s click here for a message from 50 Cent about WorldStarHipHop.

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you here’s another message from Fiddy.

PS, It was all good just a week ago.

EbenGregory was like…this scenario is far more common than the public knows. While causes ranging from aliens to secret weapons programs are being raised to explain die-offs of blackbirds­, a far more likely explanatio­n is the deliberate efforts of either the Wildlife Services Division of USDA, or the nuisance bird specialist­s of state agricultur­e department­s. Before the public (and the media) gets their knickers in a twist, somebody should hit the bird control agencies with a Freedom of Informatio­n Act request for a list of all their nuisance bird control projects with 20 miles of the site of the die-off. Even when it’s not the government­, a lot of farmers who are visited by vast flocks of blackbirds will take matters into their own hands. By soaking grain in liquid or disolved pesticides and putting it out for the birds to eat, they can wipe out hundreds or thousands of birds quickly. It is completely illegal for private citizens to do this, and it’s far more environmen­tally damaging. Unlike the poisons used by the government­, which kill only the target birds, pesticides intended for other uses will often turn the bird carcasses into toxic timebombs, killing the scavengers that feed on the bodies of the blackbirds through secondary toxicity. One way or another, die-offs result from human activity far more often than many would like to admit.

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you that’s one explanation.

EbenGregory was like…here’s what Prison Planet is reporting:

JP Morgan is paid for each case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes. Yes, you read that correctly. When the number of Americans on food stamps goes up, JP Morgan makes more money. In the video posted below, JP Morgan executive Christopher Paton admits that this is “a very important business to JP Morgan” and that it is doing very well. Considering the fact that the number of Americans on food stamps has exploded from 26 million in 2007 to 43 million today, one can only imagine how much JP Morgan’s profits in this area have soared. But doesn’t this give JP Morgan an incentive to keep the number of Americans enrolled in the food stamp program as high as possible?

There are just some things that are a little too “creepy” to be “outsourced” to private corporations. The JP Morgan executive in the interview below does his best to put a positive spin on all this, but it just seems really unsavory for a big Wall Street bank to be making so much money off of the suffering of tens of millions of Americans….

I see said the blind man. And now…

EbenGregory is like…Mr. Paton never did accurately answer her questions.

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you that your tax returns are next. They intend to start giving out debt cards instead of rebate checks. Don’t be shocked to see JP Morgan get that business too.

EbenGregory was like…here’s what CBS News is reporting:

It’s “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize efforts toward creating an “identity ecosystem” for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies.

The Obama administration is currently drafting what it’s calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months.

“We are not talking about a national ID card,” Locke said at the Stanford event. “We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.”

The Commerce Department will be setting up a national program office to work on this project, Locke said.

Details about the “trusted identity” project are unusually scarce. Last year’s announcement referenced a possible forthcoming smart card or digital certificate that would prove that online users are who they say they are. These digital IDs would be offered to consumers by online vendors for financial transactions.

Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. “I don’t have to get a credential if I don’t want to,” he said. There’s no chance that “a centralized database will emerge,” and “we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this,” he said.

I see said the blind man. And now…

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you that the Matrix is real.

EbenGregory was like…sh*t is tricky.

This is EbenGregory.com…telling you this man speaks truth but not the whole truth and that’s why he’s still alive.