Narrative shift is processing…

Thousands Of Amazon Alexa Eavesdroppers Can Also Access Users' Home Addresses

“Anytime someone is collecting where you are, that means it could go to someone else who could find you when you don’t want to be found,” said Lindsey Barrett, a staff attorney and teaching fellow at Georgetown Law’s Communications and Technology Clinic, who noted that location data is more sensitive than many other categories of user information. Widespread access to location data associated with Alexa user recordings “would set up a big red flag for me.”

What is more troubling is that Amazon appears to continue to lie when its spying ways were exposed: in an April 10 statement acknowledging the Alexa auditing program, Amazon said “employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow.”

Now that that was disproven, Amazon issued a new statement to Bloomberg, saying that “access to internal tools is highly controlled, and is only granted to a limited number of employees who require these tools to train and improve the service by processing an extremely small sample of interactions. Our policies strictly prohibit employee access to or use of customer data for any other reason, and we have a zero tolerance policy for abuse of our systems. We regularly audit employee access to internal tools and limit access whenever and wherever possible.”

After Bloomberg’s April 10 report, Amazon further limited access to data. Two of the employees said that some "data associates" who transcribe, annotate and verify audio recordings, arrived for work to find that they no longer had access to software tools they had previously used in their jobs, these people said. As of press time, their access had not been restored.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-24/thousands-amazon-alexa-eavesdroppers-can-access-users-home-addresses

Justin Trudeau's carbon tax is revenue neutral… for now: Neil Macdonald

In the late '80s, when Brian Mulroney's government announced it was proceeding with a Goods and Services Tax (GST), it was promoted as revenue neutral, at least relative to the Manufacturers' Sales Tax, the hidden levy it was replacing. Michael Wilson, Mulroney's finance minister, even laid out exactly how the extra revenue would be returned to Canadians. It would not, he promised explicitly, be used to reduce the deficit.

Eventually, it was used to reduce the deficit. Some time later, I asked Wilson whatever happened to the revenue neutrality idea. He shot me one of his impatient glares, and snapped that deficit reduction was a serious matter, and a priority, and that was that. In other words, the government decided it needed the money.

In its 2008 budget, which brought in a provincial carbon tax for British Columbians, the government of B.C. promised that "every dollar raised will be returned to the people of B.C. in the form of lower taxes."

But Liberal Premier Christy Clark just couldn't resist all that new treasure. Her government began "investing" some of the revenue in, among other things, tax goodies to encourage filmmakers.

The carbon tax will eventually mean a tremendous rise in government revenues, says Ragan. There isn't much temptation at $2.3 billion, but $20 billion is something else. And the government must resist it.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/carbon-tax-revenue-1.5107979

Barr To Give Senate Testimony About Mueller Report.

Attorney General William Barr will testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee next Wednesday, May 1st at 10 a.m. about special counsel Robert Mueller's recently concluded Russia investigation, according to the Washington Examiner.

The committee, chaired by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), listed Barr as a witness for a hearing titled "The Department of Justice’s Investigation of Russian Interference with the 2016 Presidential Election."

Earlier this month, Barr testified in front of the House Appropriations Subcommittee, where he said that the Obama campaign 'spied' on Donald Trump during the 2016 US election.

Barr released a redacted version of the long-anticipated 450-page Mueller report on Thursday, which cleared President Trump of coordinating with Russia during the 2016 US election, yet left open the question of whether Trump obstructed justice. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that Trump did not.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-24/barr-give-senate-testimony-about-mueller-report