A "public servant" at the TSA forced a type one diabetic teen girl to go through a naked body scan and grope down despite the girl having a note from her doctor detailing her medical situation.
The TSA agent lied to the girl and assured her the naked body scanner would not damage her $10,000 insulin pump.
Remember the NDAA? Yeah, for a variety of reasons that bill got a lot of attention last year -- mostly focused on the question of detainment of terrorists. But there are some other nuggets in the bill, including one tidbit about "military activities in cyberspace." The existing version of the NDAA does grant the Defense Department the ability to conduct such military activities, but only "upon direction by the President" and if the purpose is to "defend our Nation, Allies and interests," subj... (more)
We hear this idea pop up every now and again, and I'd thought by now it had been shown to be pointless enough times that no one would seriously consider it again. Apparently, I was wrong. UK Prime Minister David Cameron is considering requiring adults who want to see porn online to "opt-in" by getting what is effectively a "porn license" to surf the sites deemed naughty by the ... (more)
A Colorado elementary school student was suspended from school this week for singing a lyric from a popular LMFAO song, "I'm sexy and I know it."
Those six little words from the Los Angeles rap-influenced duo earned first-grader D'Avonte Meadows a three day dismissal from Sable Elementary in Aurora, Colo.
"I only just said the song," Meadows told Denver's ABC7 News. "I'm sexy and I know it."
School officials said D'Avonte was suspended for sexual hara... (more)
Jason Weinstein, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's criminal division, told a panel at the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee's "State of the Mobile Net" conference yesterday that requiring a search warrant to obtain location tracking information from cell phones would "cr... (more)
CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.
The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.
Here's The Pirate Bay's response to the UK's act of censorship:
The Western countries of the world all complaints about the censorship in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and so on. But they are really the worst culprits the
The FAA sure has their priorities straight. A man who videotaped some birds being sucked into an airplane's engine, forcing the plane to do an emergency landing, apparently got a letter from the FAA threatening him for not "turning off his electronic devices" during takeoff. The Consumerist has more.
MIDDLEBOROUGH (CBS) – Public swearing is so bad in Middleborough that they’re considering a plan to start enforcing a longstanding but rarely-used law.
Folks in town have had enough of kids and some adults who think it’s OK to drop high-volume obscenities in their otherwise bucolic downtown.
“It’s intimidating to my customers,” says business owner Paulette Lilla, “to the people who are out here downtown, and I think it&rsquo... (more)
Drones – unmanned aerial vehicles – come in all shapes and sizes, from nano-sized drones as small as a grain of sand that can do everything from conducting surveillance to detonating explosive charges, to massive “hunter/killer” Predator warships that unleash firepower from on high. Once used exclusively by the military to carry out aerial surveillance and attacks on enemy insurgents abroad, these remotely piloted, semi-autonomous robots have now been authorized ... (more)
We've got Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal demanding clean urine in exchange for welfare benefits (a bad idea that also doesn't work as advertised, but hey, at least the boozers are safe!), North Carolina regulators busting a blogger for praising the paleo diet (an offense that can get you tossed in the clink!), but this month the freakiest controllers come to us from a Brazil... (more)
Despite being the subject of online ridicule for months, flyers put out by the FBI under the ‘Communities Against Terrorism’ program, which frame behavior including using cash to pay for a cup of coffee as a suspicious activity, have been characterized as reasonable by the mainstream media, even as the New York Times admits that the FBI has originated most of the recent terror plots in the United States.
In a bizarrely headlined story entitled Are You a Terrorist?,... (more)
The FBI is at it again -- executing broad search warrants, disrupting legitimate Internet traffic, and getting nothing in return.
Since the end of March, a number of anonymous bomb threats have been emailed to the University of Pittsburgh. Through its investigation, the FBI discovered the threats were being relayed through a server hosted by the progressive cooperative Internet Service Provider (ISP) May First/People Link (May First). The server was used by the... (more)
The High Court has ruled that several UK ISPs including Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must censor The Pirate Bay website. This means that millions of Internet users will be prevented from accessing the popular BitTorrent site in the weeks to come. The Pirate Bay say they aren’t concerned by yet another court-ordered blockade, and point out that there are plenty of ways to circumvent such censorship.
After the MPA won its blocking case against the ... (more)
Up until this afternoon, the final vote on CISPA was supposed to be tomorrow. Then, abruptly, it was moved up today—and the House voted in favor of its passage with a vote of 248-168. But that's not even the worst part.
The vote followed the debate on amendments, several of which were passed. Among them was an absolutely terrible change (pdf and embedded below—scroll to amendment #6) to the definition of what the government can do ... (more)
Two notable incidents this week indicate that despite a “change in policy” last year, the TSA is still conducting enhanced patdowns on children as young as four years old.
At a Kansas airport, a four year old girl was called a “suspect” and ordered... (more)
An amendment introduced to the controversial CISPA bill by perennial big government advocate Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee would empower the Department of Homeland Security to intercept online IRS tax returns and any other Internet traffic deemed to transit networks owned by the federal government or operated on its behalf.
“Jackson Lee’s amendment (PDF) is broad enough to sweep in government contractors and university networks such as Internet2 and CENIC, said a telecom... (more)
This week the House of Representatives is debating CISPA, the dangerous 'cybersecurity' bill that threatens to decimate Internet users' privacy in the name of security. EFF and a wide variety of other groups have been protesting the law's provisions giving companies the power to read users' emails and other communications and hand them to the government without any... (more)
My name is Stuart Chaifetz, and my son, Akian, is a ten-year old boy who has Autism. Akian has always been a sweet and non-violent child, and that is why it was so distressing when notes started coming home from his school, Horace Mann Elementary in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, saying that he was having violent outbursts, including him hitting his teacher and aide.
... (more)
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