In today's post 9/11 America, there are 15,000 informants working with the FBI. That's nearly three times as many as there were 25 years ago.
Over the years, when there has been a surge in the number of informants the FBI recruits and uses, there's a specific target in the FBI's sights — first organized crime, then drug smuggling, and now counterterrorism.
And while the FBI uses many informants the traditional way — pointing the finger at wrongdoers &mda... (more)
A man has been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations agents in connection with streaming live sporting events over the Internet. The 19-year-old allegedly ran HQ-Streams.com and HQ-Streams.net, domains that were previously seized by ICE as part of Operation in Our Sites.
In early February 2011, U.S. authorities began the third round of Operation in Our Sites, the process which takes allegedly copyright-infringing si... (more)
Despite a prohibition on spying within the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency played a key role in transforming the New York Police Department's intelligence unit into a cutting edge spy shop dedicated to gathering information on Muslims, and not just in New York.
That's according to a new report out Wednesday by The Associated Press, which claims a veteran CIA agent helped train one of the NYPD's detectives in advanced surveillance methods. They also sent an unde... (more)
A 15 year-old schoolboy with a taste for BitTorrent went to trial yesterday after downloading and sharing 24 Hollywood movies. The case, however, has a worrying twist. Rather than being hunted down online by an anti-piracy company, the teenager was turned over to the police by the head teacher at his school. The prosecutor says he had no choice but to take action.
In March 2011 the IT department of a Gothenburg school investigated the issue of a virus which apparently came from a ... (more)
It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon and it was my day off. Sitting in my rather neglected garden, as the late afternoon light sparkled golden on the tops of the plum trees, I put down my book – the 1995 edition of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois – with more than a little annoyance. I was smack dab in the middle of a short story, “Asylum... (more)
You might be a domestic terrorist if you pay cash or if you "insist" on privacy when, for no reason, you are asked to show your identification. Sadly this is part two and not a You-Might-Be-a-Redneck-If-type joke as there is more proof that you might be a domestic terrorist if you actually believe your Constitutional Rights, or if you express concerns about Big Brother, or even if you have... (more)
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's former right-hand man has irrevocably destroyed 3500 unpublished files leaked to the whistleblower site including the complete US no-fly list, five gigabytes of Bank of America documents and detailed information about 20 neo-Nazi groups.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left WikiLeaks last year after a falling out with Assange, revealed the document destruction in an interview with Der Spiegel.
WikiLeaks has hit back, accusing Domscheit-... (more)
I guess we know why Wikileaks has been so quiet lately, it appears this character has sabotaged them from the inside. - Chris, InfoLib
Having failed with drowning polar bears, global superstorms, rising sea levels and a myriad of other manufactured hoaxes, global warming alarmists have invented a new threat to try and persuade us to pay carbon taxes directly to Al Gore and the global elite – vengeful environmentalist extraterrestrials from outer space.
“It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien a... (more)
Apparently, "Space Aliens" is the regimist's new political trump card. - Chris
HOUSTON (CN) - A Texas grandmother can push ahead with her emotional-distress complaint alleging that a Navy recruiter added her name to Homeland Security's terrorist watch list, a federal judge ruled.
In a pro se federal lawsuit filed in October 2010, Vivian Chisholm asked the Southern District of Texas to declare "that she is not a terrorist" and remove her name from Homeland Security's terrorist watch list.
... (more)
Are you ready for Big Brother 2.0? If you think that the hundreds of ways that the government watches, monitors, tracks and controls us now are bad, just wait until you see what is coming. We live in an age when paranoia is running wild. As technology continues to develop at an exponential pace, governments all over the globe are going to discover a multitude of new ways to spy on us and control our behavior. In a world where everyone is a "potential terrorist", we are to... (more)
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), who tries to estimate the cost to taxpayers of all new laws proposed by Congress has put out its report on the PROTECT IP Act, noting that it will cost taxpayers $47 million (pdf) from 2012 to 2016. Specifically, the CBO notes that the Justice Department would have to go out and hire 48 new people (22 special agents and 26 support staff) to act as Hollywood's censor police -- ... (more)
Apparently the police in Long Beach, California, have a policy that says if a police officer determines that a photographer is taking photos of something with "no apparent esthetic value," they can detain them. This revelation came after photographer Sander Roscoe Wolff was taking the following photo:
... (more)
Terms so antithetical one never expects to encounter them in the same article -- "common sense," "intelligence" and "Transportation Security Administration (TSA)" – have been popping up together in the corporate media the last few weeks. Its propagandists praise the TSA’s chief pervert, John Pistole, for "introduc[ing] just the slightest bit of intelligence and flexibility into his agency's system."
Several scams at the TSA inspired this allegation. ... (more)
The San Francisco Bay Area, historic birthplace of the Free Speech movement and a pioneer in the digital age, is now apparently the first place in the United States to have had its electronic communications deliberately disabled in order to pre-empt a political protest. As an act of prior restraint against potential protesters’ free expression, the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency cut power to the underground mobile phone ... (more)
Last month the MPAA and RIAA made a deal with all the major Internet providers in the United States to systematically hunt down file-sharers. The new “Copyright Alerts” system will directly affect millions of Internet users, but thus far the participating parties have refused to disclose which monitoring company will act as anti-piracy detectives. It’s time for the big reveal.
Starting in a few months, the copyright police will start to track down ‘pira... (more)
In the last two years, approximately 50 cybersecurity-related bills have been introduced in Congress. In May the White House released its own cybersecurity legislative proposal. The Federal Communications Commission and the Commerce Department have each proposed cybersecurity regulations of their own. Last year, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) even declared that cyberattacks might approach “weapons of mass destruction in their effects.” A rough Beltway c... (more)
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) finds itself indebted to the Nazis yet again. Adolph himself wrote in Mein Kampf, "... [T]he principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation … more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little... (more)
The character in the show is searching through some meth producer's cookbook and a Ron Paul sticker is very briefly shown on one of the pages, implying the meth producer supports Ron Paul. Very odd, to say the least.
As the rate of cancer spikes among Transportation Security Agency (TSA) officers who work near the full-body scanners at the Boston Logan Airport, union reps are alarmed at having been misinformed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and TSA regarding the safety of these machines. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsu... (more)
Well this seems questionable. Chris Soghoian has received info from a Freedom of Information Act request (which only took 11 months) that shows that the Justice Department made use of a special "emergency" claim to get ISPs to turn over info without a warrant 400% more times in 2009 than in 2008. Of course, in 2009 there was a new administration in town (one which campaigned on greater ... (more)
A United States Federal judge has given a seal of approval to the summary seizure of foreign websites.
Rojadirecta may or may not have been a pirate website; that was not the issue that was decided upon on Thursday. The issue before the court was whether Puerto 80, the Spanish-based owner of the Rojadirecta.com and org websites, would be getting their property (the domain names) returned -- and therefore whether the seizure of a website violated the First Amendment to the United S... (more)
Every time you think that the TSA has hit the bottom, they manage to hit a new low. This time a Denver couple has filed a formal grievance toward the security agency for seizing doses of insulin from a mother-to-be at Denver International Airport.
"It made me feel upset and made me feel somewhat helpless," said Aaron Nieman, husband of the alleged victim, to the ABC affiliate in Denver. The couple argued that they have traveled the world by plane and have never had an issue with ... (more)
I just opted out of the porno fucking scanner at Detroit Airport, and I was molested by a female agent of the totalitarian state. She put her hands into my pants (INTO), grabbed my boobs, felt my vagina, and checked me over in every nook and cranny. She even spent an inordinate amount of time unraveling my shirt collar and playing with it. My traveling companion – who has traveled very little in recent years – looked on in horror. I took the smartass approach most of the way. This tr... (more)
“Where are you going? What is the purpose of your trip? Where will you be staying? Who will you see there? How do you know them?” Anyone familiar with international travel will recognize such questions as a particularly unpleasant aspect of being “processed” by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Soon Americans traveling within their own country may be similarly quizzed before being allowed on an airplane.
When Frank Rodriguez and his future wife first starting having sex, they considered themselves just two of millions of teenagers who were in love.
However, their love was against the law in Texas, so Rodriguez soon joined a more exclusive group, one in which no one seeks membership: He became one of more than 650,000 registered sex offenders in the United States.
And today, after 15 years and four daughters with his high school sweetheart, the 34-year-old suburban ... (more)
Legislation that will force Internet providers to store information on all their customers and share it with the federal government and law enforcement agencies was significantly beefed at the last minute yesterday and approved by a U.S. House of Representatives committee.
Under the guise of protecting children from internet pornographers, the House Judiciary committee voted 19-10 to approve a bill that will require Internet Service Providers to store temporarily assigned... (more)
