According to US Army officials, the Army is assembling a special board to “evaluate” Pfc. Bradley Manning and determine whether he is fit to stand trial. The evaluation is the first step toward a military court-martial for Manning on charges of culpability in the WikiLeaks revelations.
Manning has been held at the Quantico brig in Virginia since July, an... (more)
We've been writing a lot about the highly questionable seizure of domain names by Homeland Security's Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group here over the last couple of months. The deeper you dig, the more ridiculous it gets. If you look over the full affidavit written by ICE special agent Andrew Reynolds, you real... (more)
Let’s bring some perspective here. People have become hysterical. They are DEMANDING Net Neutrality. Now. Right NOW. But, wait a second… they already have it. Right now, we all enjoy a neutral net. It’s here. It exists. It’s alive. And it’s fucking fantastic.
Bless their hearts. Net Neutrality advocates have good intentions. They are typically very intelligent, sophisticated, and they obviously care enough to get involved in bringing about a better w... (more)
It's really quite simple. The state is not here to "protect" you. The state is not here to "help" you. The state is an organized gang of violent criminals who seek to rob you, violently if need be, for their own nefarious ends. The politicians and bureaucrats are mafia dons with designer suits and the police are their thug enforcement arm to get you to obey their arbitrary dictates which they mask as "law." They're a parasite on productive society which only exists on theft and stealing people's money through threats of violence. As one poster quoted Friedrich Nietzsche earlier, "Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen." - Chris, InfoLib
Complaint for Forfeiture filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement reveals that many are merely sites that link to copyrighted material hosted elsewhere, yet should be seized because they “facilitate the commission” of copyright infringement.Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, finally filed a Complaint for Forfeiture against 8 of the more than 82 domain names seized late last month as part the ongoing "Operation In Our Sites.... (more)
As you're probably aware, we've been covering the many serious legal questions raised by Homeland Security's decision to use its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group to seize a bunch of domain names. As we've reported, the basis for the domain name seizures was full of serious technical and legal errors, which called into... (more)
There have been some recent reports on how China has apparently begun a massive crackdown on porn websites, shutting down tens of thousands of websites. And, while the scale is obviously significantly larger, what struck me about the reports on this crackdown is just how similar the reasoning coming from Chinese officials sounds to the reasoning from US officials concerning domai... (more)
"The Pasadena Police Department would like to inform the public that buying gold is against the law unless you are licensed by the California Department of Justice," the statement said.
In addition, police added, "Gold buyers are required by law to ask for identification from whoever they buy from and maintain a description of the items they are buying. This information is then reported to law enforcement." [...]
Business operators that buy or sell gold without a li... (more)
The Valley's chilly weather may seem like the perfect time to huddle around the fireplace, but that is exactly what worries Maricopa County air-quality officials: the health risks posed by emissions from wood-burning.
The Maricopa County Air Quality Department issues no-burn days when the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality deter
In places such as Kabul, Gaza, and Baghdad, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) hovering over homes, following suspects, and tracking enemies of the state are a daily reality.
So where are the high-tech drones buzzing to next? Miami-Dade County, natch!
The Miami-Dade Police Department is poised to become the first large metro force using drones in its aerial missions. The department finalized a deal to buy a drone called T-Hawk from defense firm Honeywell and officially... (more)
Last night at a big-city airport, on my way to catch a flight, I was stopped by undercover agents. I had already checked my baggage, and during the check the customer service agent did leave me in the middle of the baggage check for about three minutes, but the undercover agents said my stop was random. It occurred roughly three minutes after I completed checking two bags.
If you're arrested in California, data stored on your mobile phone, tablet or other portable computing devices could be seized by police without so much as a search warrant.
That's thanks to a recent decision by the state's highest court, which declared on Monday that any and all expectations of privacy are lost once a defendant is in state custody.
By a vote of 5-2, the court said police may "rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business informatio... (more)
Undertaking a costly project with an immense scope like next generation spy satellites cannot be done in private. The vast amounts of money involved in these state-of-the-art endeavors make secrecy next to impossible. This is why the current modus operandi is to cloak large scale controversial projects as private commercial ventures with a specific scientific focus like media buzz term ‘global warming’.
Wikileaks has exposed yet another of these clandestine projects ... (more)
The TSA has once again reverted to lies in an attempt to protect its new security theatre show control measures, claiming that recent reports of 70% security failure rates are no longer accurate.
Just over a fortnight ago we reported on the revelations that TSA agents are now so busy groping and irradiating airline passengers that they are routinely missing ... (more)
Shame, vanity, laziness and the desire to fit in are all to be used as tools of Government policy by ministers acting on the advice of a new psychology unit in Whitehall.
The first glimpse into the confidential work of the Cabinet Office's Behavioural Insight Team came on Tuesday when ministers suggested members of the public should be able to make small charitable donations when using cashpoints and their credit cards.
On Friday, the Cabinet Office again followed t... (more)
Judith Miller (now "Judy" for Fox News) makes a crack about Wikileaks' Julian Assange being a "bad journalist" because --wait for it--
JUDITH MILLER:... because he didn't care at all about attempting to verfiy the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone.
That's very interesting coming from Miller, an instrumental component in taking us into the Iraq War, and the subsequent deaths of tens, perhaps hundre... (more)
A standout North Carolina high school student has been suspended for the remainder of her senior year and charged with a misdemeanor for having a small paring knife in her lunchbox.
Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford told WRAL she accidentally took her father's lunchbox to Southern Lee High School in October instead of her own when school officials searched the lunchbox, along with several other students' possessions, possibly looking for drugs. [...]
China has shut down more than 60,000 pornographic websites this year and arrested 5,000 people as it steps up a campaign against obscene material.
Beijing has run a highly publicised drive against lewd online content which it claims is overwhelming the country's internet and mobile phones and threatening the emotional health of children.
Critics have accused the Chinese government of deepening the crackdown, launched last December, and said censorship had blocked ma... (more)
Apparently no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state, Fox News decided to take what passes for the law these days into its own hands today, turning in a 46 year-old grandmother from Indianapolis, Indiana for having a “possible terrorist link.”
The entire case against the woman, one Kathie Smith, appears to have been based around data culled off of her Facebook page and the content of emails they exchanged with her. The Department of Homeland Security... (more)
OKLAHOMA CITY -- The woman who made national headlines for her near-naked protest at the airport in Oklahoma City is back and once again banned from flying.
A YouTube video put Tammy Banovac in the national spotlight. Banovac says she went through security wearing next-to-nothing, to protest new security rules at airports nationwide.
... (more)
We already noted how a Wikileaks cable exposed the US's significant role in pushing for new copyright laws in Spain that matched what the US entertainment industry was demanding. The news of US involvement apparently helped convince the Spanish legislature to reject that part of a larger bill. Of course, it appears that the supp... (more)
“Fifty years ago, it made sense to assert that mental illnesses are not diseases, but it makes no sense to say so today. Debate about what counts as mental illness has been replaced by legislation about the medicalization and demedicalization of behavior. Old diseases such as homosexuality and hysteria disappear. New diseases such as gambling and smoking appear.” So writes the iconoclastic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.
Almost 50 years ago Szasz published The Myth of M... (more)
As we predicted, Homeland Security and national security state officialdom are in the process of expanding the police state and citizen humiliation grid from airports to hotels and shopping malls.
"The United States is stepping up security at ‘soft targets’ like hotels and shopping malls, as well as trains and ports, as it counters the evolving Al-Qaeda threat, a top official said Sunday," reports AFP.
