Thursday, 22 July a.d. 2010

I have now lost count of all the emails, hysterical & otherwise, I have received about the “new tax on silver & gold” that was slipped into the Obamacare bill.

WHOA. Stop. It is nothing of the kind, and in truth is MUCH worse than a mere tax on silver & gold.

Here’s what actually is happening. Section 9006 of the hilariously mis-named Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act amends the Internal Revenue Code to expand the applicability of Form 1099, but does not impose any new tax.

Currently 1099 forms are used to report miscellaneous “income” (another hilarious misnomer, which is misapplied to “revenue” to confuse the public) in the form of payments to independent contractors or the self-employed. Right, it is a method of government spying to determine how much revenue you have, which they call “income”, so they can be sure they bleed as much as possible out of you, Turnip. Chances are you might sneak around and mow a yard for $20 without giving the government its fair share.

Currently the law supposedly requires businesses to issue a 1099 to any individual or unincorporated business paid more than $600 cumulative in any calendar year. Right, 30 payments of $20 qualifies. 1099s are not required to be issued to corporations, except incorporated law firms. (Maybe lawyers cheat on their taxes more than other people?)

So what’s the change? Beginning 1 January 2012, not immediately, all payments over $600 allegedly must be reported on a 1099, including payments to corporations.

Continue reading ‘Franklin Sanders on the Coming Avalanche of 1099 Forms’

By Andrew Fowler

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has given his strongest indication yet about the next big leak from his whistleblower organisation.

There has been rampant speculation about WikiLeaks’ next revelation following its recent release of a top secret military video showing an attack in Baghdad which killed more than a dozen people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.

Continue reading WikiLeaks Founder Drops ‘Mass Spying’ Hint

By Noah Shachtman

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Continue reading Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets