A leaked training manual used in the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT) program for law enforcement and funded by the Department of Justice lists political bumper stickers expressing opposition to the United Nations and support for the bill of rights as indications of terrorist activity.
The presentation documents, leaked to the Public Intelligence website, are entitled Terrorism Training For Law Enforcement and are marked “law enforcement sensitive.” ... (more)
About this time last year, details emerged on a new cell phone tracking device being used by the FBI to triangulate suspects' locations via their cell phone signals. One of these, the StingRay, mimics mobile phone towers, allowing the feds to triangulate someone's position using signal strength. It had been used... (more)
In a scene reminiscent of the torture chapter in 1984 by George Orwell where the main character Winston is tortured into saying his torturer holding up four fingers is actually holding up five, because "the party" says four is five, Azhar Ahmed, a 20 year-old man from the UK, has been made to prostrate himself before a UK court for the "crime" of posting an anti-war facebook comment.
“You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement was scrutinized.” ~ George Orwell, 1984
Brace yourselves for the next wave in the surveillance state’s steady incursions into our lives. It&r... (more)
A few weeks back, we wrote about a proposal by Rep. Jerry Nadler, which we referred to as the RIAA Bailout Act of 2012 because it sought to change the nature of satellite radio royalties to put them on par with the absolutely ridiculous and unsustainable royalty levels for internet radio. In case you don't know, there are basically three very different tiers for the royalti... (more)
As was expected, despite not knowing the details of how the feds interpret the FISA Amendmens Act, which grants massive spying and surveillance power to the feds -- in fact, whil... (more)
We've been covering the legal fight concerning the government's desire to access Tweets and other information related to Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protestor who was arrested. Twitter had jumped into the case to argue that users have standing to protect their own information, which the court denied. Twitter then said it would appeal, but it appears that NY State Supreme Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr.... (more)
It’s been over a year since 35 ACLU affiliates filed over 380 public records requests with state and local law enforcement agencies seeking information about their policies, procedures, and practices for tracking cell phones. And 13 months later (and in the wake of this front page article in the New York Times), we’re still handling responses. We&rsq... (more)
A commercial fisherman was investigated by police for purchasing a few boxes of ammunition at his local gun store, a shocking example of how Americans are being intimidated out of exercising their second amendment rights even as the federal government buys up bullets in vast quantities.
In a You Tube clip, Brian Loftus reveals how on the 28th of ... (more)
Google has quietly expanded its list of censored search phrases with the addition of The Pirate Bay’s domain names. The blacklist prevents popular keywords from appearing in Google’s Instant and Autocomplete search services, while the pages themselves remain indexed. Although Google understands that there is no silver bullet to stop online copyright infringement, the search giant is convinced that the steps they've taken could help to decrease piracy.
A woman who had passed through airport security in Houston was detained by the Transportation Security Administration and forbidden to board the plane as punishment for exhibiting a “bad attitude.”
The TSA, which apparently exists in order to provide gainful employment for deviants and petty criminals, recently began a policy of testing b... (more)
Birthmarks, be damned: the FBI has officially started rolling out a state-of-the-art face recognition project that will assist in their effort to accumulate and archive information about each and every American at a cost of a billion dollars.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reached a milestone in the development of their Next Generation Identification (NGI) program and is now implementing the intelligence database in unidentified locales across the country, New Scientist ... (more)
Much of the debate over cybersecurity legislation like CISPA and the Cybersecurity Act focused on getting more private companies to "share data" with federal government agencies, including the FBI and the NSA. As we've pointed out time and time again, beyond the basic privacy rules that the bills tended to bulldoze through, any time you increase the sharing of private data, you're only making it that much easier for hackers to access that info because you're putting it in more places -- ... (more)
A video clip shot yesterday at Columbus Ohio Airport illustrates how the Transportation Security Administration has dreamed up a bizarre new way to waste time and taxpayer dollars – by testing drinks purchased by travelers for explosives inside the airport long after they have already passed security.
The footage shows TSA agents walking around a ... (more)
