In yesterday's Senate Judiciary Hearing, "Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," FBI Director Robert Mueller testified about the Bureau's desire to extend three expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act -- PATRIOT Section 215, authorizing secret court orders for the Internet and financial records of innocent Americans; the "lone wolf" wiretapping provision,... (more)
This idiotic advert running all over TV says if you're against 'the clean air act' you support poisoning children. Meanwhile, the same government actively poisons our tap water with fluoride. No contradiction there...
The European Commission on Monday unveiled a "single European transport area" aimed at enforcing "a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers" by 2050.
The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail.
Top of the EU's list to cut climate change emissions is a target of "zero" for the number of petrol and diesel-driven cars and lorrie... (more)
Not since AT&T whistleblower Marc Klein's 2006 revelations that U.S. telecommunications giants were secretly collaborating with the government to spy on Americans, has a story driven home the point that we are confronted by a daunting set of invisible enemies: the security and intelligence firms constellating the dark skies of the National Security State.
As echoes from last month's disclosures by the cyber-gue... (more)
In the next years, if you find someone online defending the warfare state, it just might be a government propagandist. The web persona might be a complete fake, even the product of a computer program concocted by the US military “to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda,” reports the Guardian.
It has become fashionable since 2001 or so to call the situation in America ”Orwellian,” but before long, we will need another term,... (more)
Education Department officials are threatening school principals with lawsuits if they fail to monitor and curb students’ lunchtime chat and evening Facebook time for expressing ideas and words that are deemed by Washington special-interest groups to be harassment of some students.
There has only been muted opposition to this far-reaching policy among the professionals and advocates in the education sector, most of whom are heavily reliant on funding and support from top-lev... (more)
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow ... (more)
President Obama’s so-called “IP Czar” Victoria Espinel yesterday delivered a 20-page white paper containing her recommendations for future legislation, calling on Congress to make changes in order to make it easier to clamp down on copyright infringement. Among the recommendations are calls to turn streaming into a felony alongside authority to wiretap in copyright cases.
The Obama administration’s IP Enforcement Coordinator, Victoria Espinel, has finally r... (more)
At the end of last year, we pointed to some discussions that suggested the TSA was being totally misleading in claiming that the new naked airport scanners had been shown to be totally safe when it came to radiation. While the studies the TSA used to make that claim only said that was the case if the machines were working properly, there w... (more)
Police in Miami will soon be using a noisy bit of technology called a MAV, or Micro Air Vehicle, to snoop on citizens.
Miami-Dade Sgt. Andrew Cohen told CBS Miami the drone will be used to gather real time information in situations that may be too dangerous for officers.
"If an SRT (Special Response Team) has to go into an area they don't know ... (more)
Last week, Bryan McCarthy, the 32 year old operator of ChannelSurfing.net, was arrested on charges of criminal copyright infringement. ChannelSurfing.net was one of the streaming sports sites that had its domain seized by federal authorities shortly before the Super Bowl as part of the "In Our Sites" program, run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Immigration and Cu... (more)
While Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group has been seizing lots of domains under questionable legal theories, it has been slow to follow through on any sort of actual lawsuits. However, with one of the domains seized a month ago, channelsurfing.net, ICE has now arrested someone and charged him with criminal copyright infringement, such that h... (more)
Taking photographs from the roadside of a sunrise over hay bales near the Suwannee River, horses grazing near Ocala or sunset over citrus groves along the Indian River could land you in jail under a Senate bill filed Monday.
SB 1246 by Sen. Jim Norman, R-Tampa, would make it a first-degree felony to photograph a farm without first obtaining written permission from the owner. A farm is defined as any land "cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production, the raising and breed... (more)
The next generation of body scanners to be rolled out in airports will literally be able to see inside the human body, as security personnel gear up to trial machines that use deep penetrating radiation, the same kind hospitals use to examine internal organs and bones.
Taxing the air we exhale, rationing human necessities, a global one-child policy, geoengineering (high-altitude chemical spraying), and now nuclear war have all been proposed to combat global warming. Have climate theorists lost their marbles, or just their humanity?
There has not been much middle ground found between global warming believers and the “it’s a hoax” crowd. I started as a believer after watching An Inconvenient Truth. ... (more)
