Author: Justin Lane

56 percent of Americans feel that the NSA’s wiretapping program is an acceptable means by which the government can investigate terrorism, according a Pew Research Poll released yesterday. The numbers reflect that the public is divided on the subject however as 41 percent of Americans consider the practice unacceptable. The poll, conducted in early June, was sponsored by The Washington Post, and Pew’s release states that the recent disclosures by Edward Snowden regarding the NSA’s programs have not had a significant effect on the public’s views about communications security. Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s wiretapping programs are blanketing the...

The United States’ credit rating score has been improved by credit rating agency Standard & Poors (S&P), according to Reuters. The agency had previously downgraded the U.S. ranking from AAA to AA with an outlook that was negative. The new score changes that outlook from negative to “stable” but S&P voiced concerns over the government’s ability to deal with the need to issue increased amounts of debt, commonly referred to as the debt ceiling, in the future. Party divide over the past several years has produced, as we have stated before, a climate of no-compromise from the Republican and...

Below are Ring of Fire’s top stories from the past week.   Bradley Manning Trial Gets No Stenographers, Orders Court After majors news outlets raised over $60,000 to hire stenographers to record Pfc. Bradley Manning’s trial, the military court overseeing the trial has denied the stenographers press passes, cutting off any written record of the proceedings. … Read more. Despite Customer Outrage, NSA Surveillance of Verizon Wireless Phone Records Continues Mega-corporation Verizon Wireless has been disclosing its customers’ phone records to the government, and it seems the backlash being seen from the wireless company’s angry customers is doing very...

Is it comforting that government officials have come forward to say that they do not have people review the contents of the majority of wire intercepts? Instead, the vast majority of data and metadata collected by the government from telecom companies and websites is sorted by algorithms and only a small portion is ever reviewed by actual human beings. This is intended to provide some comfort, although security agencies like the NSA are collecting unprecedented and enormous amounts of data, through programs like PRISM, on individuals using telecommunication networks in the United States. Recently, it has come to light...

What crawled up Stuart Varney’s craw yesterday that sent him badmouthing “the poor”? Nothing really, he’s always had it out for “the poor,” which some would call “Americans.” Ring of Fire host Mike Papantonio has gone toe-to-toe with Varney on multiple occasions to defend the working-class, and the story from Varney has remained the same: let the rich get richer and the poor, poorer. Yesterday, on Fox and Friends, Varney admitted he’s been “mean to poor people” but not as an indictment of his past foibles. Instead, Varney exalts that his selfish philosophy is the philosophy that protects America....