'Students and parents at two San Antonio schools are in revolt over a program that forces kids to wear RFID tracking name tags which are used to pinpoint their location on campus as well as outside school premises.
Students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School will be mandated to wear the tags from today which will be used to track the... (more)
For more than a year and a half, the Mexican government has been collecting an unprecedented amount of biometric data from minors ages 4 to 17 as part of a youth ID card program. The Personal Identity Card for minors, a document authorities say is intended to help streamline registration in schools and health facilities, comes embedded with digital records of iris images, fingerprints, a photograph, and a signature for each minor.
On departing the RNC in Tampa yesterday, Ron Paul, his wife and grand-daughter were subjected to harassment by the TSA at a small airport in Clearwater, Florida.
Eight TSA goons told the Paul entourage they would need to be screened before they would be allowed to leave because Mitt Romney might be nearby.
The insinuation was obvious — Paul and his family pose a threat to the GOP presidential candidate.
We've argued for a while that the US's effort to censor websites at home while talking about internet freedom is hypocritical and takes away any moral high ground the US might have had with other countries concerning their efforts to censor the... (more)
Next to the MPAA, the main lobbying organization that pushed SOPA was the US Chamber of Commerce. The organization and its laughably inept "Global Intellectual Property Center" are infamous for the fact that they have absolutely no shame in using completely bogus numbers to argue for bad laws that their highest spending backers support. Not surpri... (more)
Last year, in writing about the US government's vindictive lawsuit against whistleblower and former NSA employee Thomas Drake, we also talked about William Binney -- another ex-NSA employee and whistleblower (who was also raided by the feds, though they failed to find anything they could pin on him in a lawsuit). Binney is the mathemat... (more)
The Department of Homeland Security will begin releasing a dead bacteria into the Boston subway tomorrow in an operation it says will test sensors designed to detect biological agents that could be released as part of a terrorist attack.
Little is known about what exactly the bacteria consists of, and the DHS has not been very forthcoming with information, saying only that it is a “non-infectious” material that has been “approved as a food supplement”... (more)
Advanced technology now provides government agents and police officers with the ability to track our every move. The surveillance state is our new society. It is here, and it is spying on you, your family and your friends every day. Worse yet, those in control are using life’s little conveniences, namely cell phones, to do much of the spying. And worst of all, the corporations who produce these little conveniences are happy to hand your personal information over to the police so ... (more)
While we've written plenty about the US Justice Department and US Homeland Security (via ICE) seizing various websites on questionable legal authority by claiming they were tools used for criminal copyright infringement, a series of pretty massive screwups seemed to have them, at least temporarily, shying away from such seizures around copyright claims. Huge errors like seizing Dajaz1 for over a year and then having to admit they had no evidence and give it back seemed to at least make them... (more)
A man and his wife were treated as potential terrorists and kicked off a Delta Airlines flight over a satirical T-shirt because it made passengers and employees feel “very uncomfortable”.
Writing on his blog, Arijit Guha describes how he was flying out of Buffalo-Niagara Airport after attending his wife’s grandfather’s funeral. Having passed through security without a problem, Guha was approached by a Delta... (more)
For some time we have been warning that the TSA is systematically moving beyond the nation’s airports and conducting operations on the streets of America.
The latest example of this kind of activity occurred at an event organized by Mitt Romney’s GOP running mate Paul Ryan this past weekend in The Villages, Florida.
The Shark Tank blog reports that TSA officers showed up alongside Secret Service and the local Sumter County Sheriff's Office, and... (more)
Supporters of Brandon Raub – the man kidnapped by police and committed to a mental institution for his political posts on Facebook – fear the former Marine is being ‘disappeared’ by authorities after he was forcibly transferred to a psychiatric facility more than three hours away from his family and legal team.
Raub, a former veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was involuntarily detained for psychiatric questioning last week by authorities in V... (more)
A family has been harassed by social services and police for the egregious crime of allowing their children to play outside in another example of how the nanny state is running wild in America.
Lenore Skenazy, editor of the Free Range Kids website, was contacted by a mother in Virginia who related her story of how she was interrogated by police four times and visited by social services twice after her children were ... (more)
We've been following the Surfthechannel/Scopelight case since early on, and there have always been serious questions about it. More than three years ago, we were wondering why a private, Hollywood-financed anti-piracy operation called FACT wasn't just able to take part in the raid of Anton Vickerman's house, but also got to take the computers that were seized. A private party should never be able to get the computers of those that they're accusing in a criminal case. Soon after Vic... (more)
A local elementary school is trying to implement a new program in their cafeteria. But the palm vein scanner is being met with much opposition from Moss Bluff Elementary parents.
"I was very, very mad," said parent Mamie Sonnier. "Disappointed."
Many parents felt that way on Monday after reading a letter sent home with their children from Moss Bluff Elementary School. The letter introduced a new program, the palm vein scanner, to move students through the lunch line... (more)
Good god, imagine how filthy this scanner must get. - Chris
