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In 2013, the #BlackLivesMatter movement quickly took off in response to the shooting of an African-American teenager, Trayvon Martin, by George Zimmerman. Ever since then, there has been a debate between two ideologies one being the Black Lives Matter ideology and the other being All Lives Matter ideology. I have no solid stance on the issue between the two ideologies. I feel like only saying a specific group of peoples lives matter is dangerous, but I also do know that African-Americans have undergone terrible civil injustices. I dont get caught up in media buzzwords, so whether someone says all lives matter or black lives matter does not really matter to me. However, I hope those that do claim that black lives matter are consistent with what they believe.

According to the main website for BLM, one of the guiding principles for the movement is as follows, We are committed to embodying and practicing justice, liberation and peace in our engagements with one another.I sincerely hope that those involved with the movement include pre-born boys and girls in that statement. I know several anti-abortion activists who are a part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. I have no problem with people saying that black lives matter. However, I will have a problem if they are only talking about a certain group of black Americans.

I wont generalize, but its no secret that BLM comes mainly from the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has recently been taking more and more of a pro-abortion stance. However, let's take a look at the state of New York, a state won by Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. In 2013 alone,34,960 abortions of African-American babies were performed, according to the New York Department of Health.This shows that the Democratic Party does not care about all black lives, but only a certain type of black lives. Its very contrary to the purpose of the BLM movement, which is to end discrimination of a type of group because of something that they cannot control.

As I have said, I see nothing wrong with anyone using thehashtag #BlackLivesMatter or following the movement. As a matter of fact, I applaud anyone who stands up for any sort of injustice, just like I do with abortion. Civil rights begin in the womb. If you believe that black lives matter, then act accordingly and stand against the current holocaust that is killing thousands of pre-born African-Americanboys and girls by the day. If you support the legal killing of African-American pre-born children, then do you really think that all black lives matter? So therefore I ask you, if youre pro-choice, dont say that all black lives matter.

Jacob is a sophomore studying pre-law at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those ofThe Post. How do you feel about the Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter ideologies? Let Jacob know by tweeting him@JacobHoback.

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Pro-Life Pondered: You cannot be pro-choice and support Black Lives Matter - The Post

Your online social network doesnt just keep you connected, it can also help you stay fit, a new study shows.

A team of researchers led byJure Leskovec, PhD, (who recently was named a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator) an Stanford associate professor of computer science, have shown that participating in a social network on a health app can boost physical activity.

The team tapped data from the Argus app which tracks heart rate, steps and daily exercise from 6 million app users over five years. The app gives users a choice whether to join a social network, allowing them to share data, or to simply track their progress.

The researchers showed that users who joined the social network saw a 7 percent (around 400 steps) increase in physical activity, an effect that lasted for around 20 weeks.

We were able to show that network connections influence us to be more active and that social network users are not simply more intrinsically motivated to exercise, said team memberTim Althoff, a graduate student, in a recent Stanford Engineering news article.

Demographics do play a role, however: The researchers found that women were most influenced by other women and that 30 to 45 year olds had the biggest boost in physical activity. The social networking component also proved beneficial for users characterized as obese.

The impact of this research extends beyond exercise, the study authors said. These findings can also be used to design effective support systems to promote healthy lifestyles. Online social networks are a powerful tool to provide social support and influence healthy behaviors, Leskovec said in the release.

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Social networks may boost fitness, Stanford researchers say - ScienceBlog.com (blog)

As an accounting professional, you have a wide variety of choices to help market yourself or advance your career, the most common of which is social media. But being a part of a professional organization has its advantages too.

So which is best?

Well, we know social networks are everywhere now. Social networks are unique to everyone based on friends, family members or a desire to network with similar individuals in your community.

The best examples are of course Facebook or LinkedIn; networks of people that group together to discuss, contribute and share information in closed or open group forums. While social media groups do give different perspectives on topics they can lead to being persuaded to taking a path that could be an opinion rather than fact. The group may or may not contain an expert on the subject matter that is commenting on the post.

The professional organization, however, is a group of individuals coming together for a common purpose with varied backgrounds. A professional community offers a unique perspective as members share information and feel that they can benefit from the cooperation of an alliance.

Typically, the professional organization goal is to give a voice to the members, to protect and guide the profession and create direction for the individuals. There is overlap between the two type of communities above, but understand one is geared towards a mutual interest the other is defined by the person and are unique to that individual.

Excellent examples of professional organizations are the AICPA for CPAs or the American Bar Association for Lawyers and, of course, the ICBUSA for bookkeepers.

Key Items to Look For in a Professional Membership Organization

As a professional joining an organization focused on your community will benefit you to help give direction in a career. Like-minded professionals offer different perspectives and opportunity for knowledge growth based on the common interest.

The professional community can help offset some of the unknown changes that will occur in the future through synergistic information and guidance. Professional groups are excellent training for the future. Look for groups that have physical meetups where you can socialize in person and get to network and create an in-person bond. The live networking is one of the best ways to learn communication and soft skills that will benefit you beyond virtual social networking.

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Social Networks vs. Professional Organizations - Accountingweb.com (blog)

One of several service providers to sue the government over its gag orders, Microsoft received some good news from a federal judge in its lawsuit against the DOJ. Microsoft is challenging gag orders attached to demands for data and communications, which the DOJ orders is statutorily-supported by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and, if not, by supposed national security concerns.

As Microsoft pointed out in its lawsuit, the government rarely justifies its secrecy demands and frequently issues gag orders with no endpoint. Microsoft received nearly 2,800 of these gag-ordered requests over an 18-month period, with over two-thirds of them demanding silence indefinitely.

The good news is a federal judge has (partially) waved away the DOJ's motion to dismiss and will allow Microsoft to proceed with its lawsuit, as Politico's Josh Gerstein reports.

U.S, District Court Judge James Robart issued a 47-page opinion [PDF] Thursday allowing Microsoft to proceed with a lawsuit claiming a First Amendment violation when the government restricts internet providers from notifying subscribers about requests for their data.

"The orders at issue here are more analogous to permanent injunctions preventing speech from taking place before it occurs," Robart wrote. "The court concludes that Microsoft has alleged sufficient facts that when taken as true state a claim that certain provisions of Section 2705(b) fail strict scrutiny review and violate the First Amendment."

Section 2705(b) refers to the Stored Communications Act, which allows the government demand notice be withheld under certain circumstances, unless otherwise forbidden to by another section of the same law (Section 2703). Microsoft is looking to have both sections declared unconstitutional, especially given the severe upheaval the communications landscape has undergone in the thirty years since the law was passed.

Microsoft contends that Section 2705(b) is unconstitutional facially and as applied because it violates the First Amendment right of a business to talk to [the businesss] customers and to discuss how the government conducts its investigations. Specifically, Microsoft contends that Section 2705(b) is overbroad, imposes impermissible prior restraints on speech, imposes impermissible content-based restrictions on speech, and improperly inhibits the publics right to access search warrants. Microsoft also alleges that Sections 2705(b) and 2703 are unconstitutional facially and as applied because they violate the Fourth Amendment right of people and businesses . . . to know if the government searches or seizes their property.

Microsoft contends that the statutes are facially invalid because they allow the government to (1) forgo notifying individuals of searches and seizures, and (2) obtain secrecy orders that prohibit providers from telling customers when the government has accessed their private information without constitutionally sufficient proof and without sufficient tailoring.

The DOJ argued Microsoft didn't have standing to bring this complaint, as its Fourth Amendment rights aren't implicated. Only its customers' are. But the court points out that, if nothing else, the company does have standing to pursue its claims of First Amendment violations.

The court finds that Microsoft has sufficiently alleged an injury-in-fact and a likelihood of future injury. Microsoft alleges an invasion of its legally protected interest in speaking about government investigations due to indefinite nondisclosure orders issued pursuant to Section 2705(b)... The court concludes that Section 2705(b) orders that indefinitely prevent Microsoft from speaking about government investigations implicate Microsofts First Amendment rights.

The court goes on to point out that frequent use of indefinite gag orders certainly appears to be unconstitutional, given that they act as a "forever" application of prior restraint.

The court also concludes that Microsoft's assertions of further civil injuries aren't speculative, as the DOJ claimed. Judge Robart points to the government's own actions as evidence of continued harm to Microsoft's civil liberties.

Microsoft bolsters its prediction by alleging that over a 20-month period preceding this lawsuit, the Government sought and obtained 3,250 ordersat least 4504 of which accompanied search warrantsthat contained indefinite nondisclosure provisions. In addition, Microsoft alleges that in this District alone, it has received at least 63 such orders since September 2014. Because these orders have been frequent and issued recently, the Government will likely continue to seek and obtain them. Accordingly, Microsofts fears of similar injuries in the future are not merely speculative.

Unfortunately, the court won't grant Microsoft the standing to represent its users for Fourth Amendment purposes. Judge Robart points to a whole bunch of precedential decisions declaring otherwise, but at least takes a bit of time to discuss how denying Microsoft this opportunity likely means denying several of its users any sort of redress.

The court acknowledges the difficult situation this doctrine creates for customers subject to government searches and seizures under Sections 2703 and 2705(b). As Microsoft alleges, the indefinite nondisclosure orders allowed under Section 2705(b) mean that some customers may never know that the government has obtained information in which those customers have a reasonable expectation of privacy... For this reason, some of Microsofts customers will be practically unable to vindicate their own Fourth Amendment rights.

Expect the government to make heavy use of its "national security" mantra as it defends itself in this case. Those magic words have allowed all sorts of civil liberties violations in the past and still tend to move courts to the government's side when deployed in DOJ motions. If the court does side with Microsoft when this is all said and done, it's likely the remedy won't be a restriction on gag orders, but more likely something analogous to the rules that now govern National Security Letters -- periodic review of gag orders by the government and better avenues for raising challenges for companies affected. Then again, the court could simply punt it back to legislators and push them to fix the 30-year-old law whose dubious constitutionality is the source of numerous lawsuits against the federal government.

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Court Says Microsoft Can Sue Government Over First Amendment-Violating Gag Orders - Techdirt

In 2010, Thomas Drake, a former senior employee at the National Security Agency, was charged with espionage for speaking to a reporter from the Baltimore Sun about a bloated, dysfunctional intelligence program he believed would violate Americans privacy. The case against him eventually fell apart, and he pled guilty to a single misdemeanor, but his career in the NSA was over.

Though Drake was largely vindicated, the central question he raised about technology and privacy has never been resolved. Almost seven years have passed now, but Pat Eddington, a former CIA analyst, is still trying to prove that Drake was right.

While working for Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., Eddington had the unique opportunity to comb through still-classified documents that outline the history of two competing NSA programs known as ThinThread and Trailblazer. Hes seen an unredacted version of the Pentagon inspector generals 2004 audit of the NSAs failures during that time, and has filed Freedom of Information Act requests.

In January, Eddington decided to take those efforts a step further by suing the Department of Defense to obtain the material, he tells The Intercept. Those documents completely vindicate those who advocated for ThinThread at personal risk, says Eddington.

The controversy dates back to 1996, whenEd Loomis, then a computer systems designer for the NSA, along with his team worked to move the NSAs collection capabilities from the analog to the digital world. The shift would allow the NSA to scoop up internet packets, stringing them together into legible communications, and automating a process to instantly decide which communications were most interesting, while masking anything from Americans. The prototype, called GrandMaster, would need to ingest vast amounts of data, but only spit out what was most valuable, deleting or encrypting everything else.

Then in the fall of 2001,four passenger airliners were hijacked by terrorists as part of a suicide plot against Washington, D.C., and New York City. The U.S. intelligence community faced a disturbing wakeup call: its vast collection systems had failed to prevent the attacks.

Yet, in response, the NSA simply started collecting more data.

The NSA sent out a bid to multiple defense contractors, seeking a program that could collect and analyze communications from phones and the internet. Science Applications Internal Corporation, or SAIC, won the contract, known as Trailblazer. Meanwhile, internally, NSA employees were developing a similar, less costly alternative called ThinThread, a follow-on to GrandMaster. ThinThread would collect online communications, sort them, and mask data belonging to Americans.

Those involved in ThinThread argue that their approach was better than a collect-it-all approach taken by NSA.

Bulk collection kills people, says Bill Binney, a former NSA analyst, who rose to be a senior technical official with a dream of automating the agencys espionage. You collect everything, dump it on the analyst, and they cant see the threat coming, cant stop it, he says.

Binney built a back-end system a processor that would draw on data collected by ThinThread, analyze it, look at whether or not the traffic was involves American citizens, and pass on what was valuable for foreign intelligence.

Bulk acquisition doesnt work, agrees Kirk Wiebe, a former NSA senior analyst, who was trying to help convince NSA of ThinThreads value at the time.

The analysts are drowning in data, and Binney and Wiebe believe ThinThread would have solved the problem by helping the NSA sort through the deluge automatically while protecting privacy using encryption.

But Binney and Wiebe say advocates of ThinThread hit every possible bureaucratic roadblock on the way, sitting in dozens of meetings with lawyers and lawmakers. In the meantime, Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA at the time, said he decided to fund an outside contract for a larger effort, focused on gathering all communications, not just those over the internet, as ThinThread was designed to do.

Additionally, while ThinThread masked American communications, Haydens legal and technical advisors were concerned the collection itself would be a problem. Some of Haydens senior officials at the NSA came from SAIC, the company that won contract to design a proof of concept for Trailblazer.

A tiny group of people at NSA had developed a capability for next to no money at all to give the government an unprecedented level of access to any number of foreign terrorists, Eddington says. Instead that system was shut down in favor of an SAIC boondoggle that cost taxpayers, by my last count, close to a billion dollars.

He argues the contract, and the incestuous relationship between the NSA chief and the contractor never received the scrutiny it deserved. It was clearly an ethical problem, Loomis said.

Ultimately, however, the NSA went with Trailblazer. Hayden rejected the ThinThread proposal because the intelligence communitys lawyers were concerned it wouldnt work on a global scale, and that it would vacuum up too much American data. Hayden has continued dismissing concerns years later as the grumblings of disgruntled employees. Hayden told PBS Frontline ThinThread was not the answer to the problems we were facing, with regard to the volume, variety and velocity of modern communications.

In 2002, Wiebe, Binney, Loomis, Drake, and Diane Roark, a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee who had been advocating for ThinThread, united to complain to the Defense Departments inspector general, arguing that ThinThread, while still a prototype, would be the best surveillance system. The oversight body completed its report in 2004, which included major concerns about Trailblazer.

We talked about going for the nuclear option, Wiebe said, referring to discussions at the time about contacting the press.

But Drake went it alone, however, never telling his colleagues what he planned to do. Stories about the disagreements started showing up in news headlines based on leaks. The Bush administration in 2007 sent the FBI after the whistleblowers, raiding each of the whistleblowers homes who raised complaints to the Pentagon inspector general. Drake faced espionage charges after speaking to a reporter from the Baltimore Sun about the alleged mismanagement and waste in the NSA.

Though Drake wasnt sent to prison, he lost his career in government, and now works at an Apple store. The question of whether ThinThread would have provided a better capability than Trailblazer was never resolved.

While ThinThread never made it to production, some of the analytic elements, minus the privacy protections, made it into Fort Meade as part of a massive surveillance program now known as Stellar Wind.

But there may be a way to settle the debate. The watchdog agency tasked with oversight of the Department of Defense completed a full investigation into the battle between ThinThread and the Trailblazer. The Pentagon inspector general published a heavily redacted version of that investigation in 2011; that report is now the only public record available, aside from the account of the whistleblowers who exposed it.

Despite everything thats come out about its surveillance programs, the NSA still wont release the full ThinThread investigation. I dont really know what theyre trying to hide, said Loomis.

Loomis says he thinks those redactions were more for the sake of Haydens reputation than protecting real classified information. He eventually documented the saga in a self-published book called NSAs Transformation: An Executive Branch Black Eye.

Drake told The Intercept in an email that efforts to uncover the Pentagon inspector generals ThinThread investigation were a large part of his defense. Since then, the Office of Special Counsel concluded last March that the Department of Justice may have destroyed evidence that might have helped exonerate him.

In the meantime, however, hope is fading that the entire story of ThinThread will emerge from behind the government door of secrecy. Weve been trying for 15 or 16 years now to bring the U.S. government the technical solution to save lives, but they fight us left and right, said Wiebe.

Eddington says the ThinThread controversy demonstrates the lack of oversight of the intelligence community. The mentality that gave us this system is still in place, he says. We could see this become de facto permanent, he said.

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Former CIA Analyst Sues Defense Department to Vindicate NSA Whistleblowers - The Intercept