Federal Communications Commission Chief Ajit Pai has announced that on December 14, the body will vote to pare back net neutrality rules. Internet freedom activists and progressive organizations immediately responded to the announcement with a wave of opposition, as was expected.

But more interestingly, in some of the most right-wing and Trump-supporting corners of the internet, there is a rebellion brewing.

Take, for instance, Breitbart News. The popular right-wing website has been a loyal ally to President Donald Trump, perhaps more devoted to his cause than any other.

The privacy of emails, photos stored in the cloud, even heart rate history from a smartwatch could be at stake, according to civil libertarians, as the Supreme Court takes up a potential blockbuster case after Thanksgiving.

When they return to the bench after the holiday, the justices will weigh whether the history of cell phone locations stored by a phone service provider is searchable without a warrant.

The case, Carpenter v. U.S., centers on Timothy Carpenter, who argues the government violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure when it obtained his cell phone location records from MetroPCS and Sprint without a warrant. Authorities then used that data as trial evidence to convict him of a string of robberies at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Michigan and Ohio from December 2010 to March 2011.

The government argues that it was well within its rights under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to get a court order for the records. The law allows this type of data to be searched if the government can show reasonable grounds to believe it will be relevant to a criminal investigation.

To obtain a warrant, law enforcement officers, however, must show there is probable cause.

Soon the cops will be kicking in your door because Facebook says you're a danger to yourself ... or others.

This is software to save lives? Facebook's new "proactive detection" artificial intelligence technology will scan all posts for patterns of suicidal thoughts, and when necessary send mental health resources to the user at risk or their friends, or contact local first-responders. By using AI to flag worrisome posts to human moderators instead of waiting for user reports, Facebook can decrease how long it takes to send help.

Facebook previously tested using AI to detect troubling posts and more prominently surface suicide reporting options to friends in the U.S. Now Facebook is will scour all types of content around the world with this AI, except in the European Union, where General Data Protection Regulation privacy laws on profiling users based on sensitive information complicate the use of this tech.

Actor Kadian Noble has accused the disgraced producer of sexual assault during the film festival in 2004, violating sex trafficking laws

Harvey Weinstein has been accused of violating sex trafficking laws as an aspiring actor has launched a lawsuit against him.

Kadian Noble alleges that the disgraced producer invited her to his hotel room during the Cannes film festival in 2004 claiming that he wanted to cast her in a forthcoming movie. She claims that he proceeded to grope her before trapping her in the bathroom and forcing her to perform sexual acts.

Noble's suit alleges that during the encounter, he told her: "Everything will be taken care of for you if you relax." The suit is aimed not only at Harvey Weinstein but also his brother, Bob, and their company the Weinstein Company, citing "reckless disregard" on their parts.

Such ignorance of the world-at-large from Americans is to be expected
As many Americans celebrate all things to be thankful for by bashing in each other's heads for deals on big screen TVs, blenders and underwear, with even average American nutjobs showing their dedication to what Christmas IS NOT all about by dressing up as store employees in order to score "deals" on more junk made in China, they might want to sober up and pay a bit more attention to the world-at-large rather than be consumed with consuming more and more:

Male guides who "identify" as female will be allowed to shower with girls during camping trips, Girlguiding UK literature has revealed.

Official guidance distributed by the organisation, which applies to Girl Guides between the ages of five and 25, tells guide leaders to let "transgender" members share changing rooms, toilets, tents, and cabins with girls while away on excursions.

The move came as the 107-year-old organisation updated advice regarding male guides who "identify" as female, a demographic it was revealed in January is now being admitted to the girls-only organisation.

On its official UK website, Girlguiding UK says that for transgender people, "the use of gendered facilities, such as toilets, can cause anxiety".


"Members are entitled to use the facilities of the gender that they self-identify as," adds the organisation, which confirmed when asked by the Mail on Sunday that this includes showers, toilets, and changing rooms.

Dozens of police departments in the United States have been granted new powers, or are seeking them, to check the immigration status of people they arrest, aiding President Donald Trump's broad crackdown on people living in the country illegally.

Since Trump took office in January, 29 departments have joined a special program under which they are deputized to perform some tasks of immigration agents, doubling its size in 10 months, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. And the administration hopes that is just the beginning.

Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that the administration has also had contact with scores of additional jurisdictions about the program, and 38 of those told Reuters in interviews they have submitted applications for the program or are potentially interested in joining.

The program, known as 287(g), deputizes local officers trained by ICE to use federal records to vet arrestees they suspect of being in the country illegally and then turn them over to federal agents if they are.

The Department of Homeland Security has said in the past that police forces taking part in the program have flagged tens of thousands of people for deportation.

The FDNY is in all-hands-on-deck mode after a fire and smoke prompted over 100 people to evacuate 1540 Broadway in Times Square, including the 45-story Viacom building. No injuries have been reported so far.

The fire began around 4:30pm in a storage room of the Midtown Manhattan skyscraper's parking garage, the FDNY said, WCBS reported.

The New York Times has come under fire by the public for publishing and featuring a meandering and kooky article that argues that the male libido is inherently violent and masculinity is inherently "monstrous."

The article has a heady title: "The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido." But the tweet the NYT chose to announce the piece gets more to the heart of the matter: "Opinion: If you let boys be boys, they will murder their fathers and sleep with their mothers."

This is pretty much the thesis statement of a rambling 1,500 word column that reads like some modestly popular Tumblr post evolved into a Huffington Post article that was caught by an editor and buried deep in the website. In the NYT, however, the article by Canadian writer Stephen Marche (a man, it bears mentioning) is a featured column, prominently placed on the front page of the Times' opinion section.

Once the bete noire of the right, now the actor finds herself even more hated by the left for refusing to support Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. She talks about Hollywood sexism, female empowerment and playing Bette Davis

Susan Sarandon at 71 is bright-eyed and airy, and perhaps shyer than she can publicly seem. When I walk into the room - a private members' club in downtown New York, where she sits with a small dog at her feet - she doesn't say hello or make eye-contact, giving what I suspect is a false impression of rudeness. It may also be that she is uncertain of her reception. For a long time Sarandon was despised by the right, her protests against the Vietnam war and US aggression in Nicaragua and Iraq making her the kind of target that, for progressives, is an affirmation of sorts. Her latest unpopularity, by contrast, comes exclusively from the left and is much tougher on Sarandon. "I'm not attacked from the right at all," she will tell me. Instead, she is accused of not checking her white privilege, of throwing away her vote on a third-party candidate (the Green party nominee, Jill Stein) during the US presidential election, and of recklessly espousing a political cause that let Trump in through the backdoor. Liberals in the US, it seems, can summon more hatred for Sarandon right now than they can for Paul Ryan.

Most infuriating of all, to her critics, is that she won't admit her error. Sarandon's very physiognomy suggests defiance; she looks indignant even at rest. She also looks a lot like Bette Davis, so much so that Davis herself, in her dotage, approached Sarandon to play her. That project never happened, but in the new eight-part Ryan Murphy series Feud: Bette and Joan, about the battle for Hollywood supremacy between Davis and Joan Crawford, Sarandon gets her chance. The two leads are terrific: Jessica Lange, by turns monstrous and pathetic as Crawford; Sarandon steelier, smarter, less obviously vulnerable. She sees a lot of similarities between herself and Davis. "We're both east coast," she says. "I didn't consider myself a star; I was a character actor from the very beginning and not really sold as pretty, which is probably what's allowed me to survive as long as I have. I have this broader phase."