I had previously heard nothing about the tragic and remarkable case of Andrew Wordes of Roswell, Ga., who set his house on fire and blew it and himself up as police arrived to evict him from his foreclosed-upon home. It was Agora's 5 Min. Forecast that alerted me to the case, and this report remains... (more)
A cop who shot a fleeing unarmed man in the back has just been ordered to be reinstated to the force by a state arbitrator. The man who was killed ran away after police started shooting at him with bean bag bullets, as he attempted to flee the gun fire, a cop took an AR-15 rifle and shot him in the back.
Via Oregon Live:
A state arbitrator has ruled in Portland police union's favor, saying fired Portland Officer Ronald Frashour should get his job back. ... (more)
New data from law enforcement agencies across the country has confirmed what EFF has long been afraid of: while police are routinely using cell phone location tracking information, only a handful of agencies are bothering to obtain search warrants.
Since 2005, we've been beating the drum loudly, warning that the government's attempts to track a person's physical location through their cell phone requires a search warrant.... (more)
A Board of Trustees meeting at Santa Monica City College turned chaotic on Tuesday night when protesting students were pepper sprayed, indoors, by police trying to control the unruly crowd. Among those caught in fracas was a... (more)
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) hasn’t received a whole lot of media attention yet, but it continues to pick up support from legislators.
The bill is touted as being much worse than SOPA when it comes to privacy invasions.
Just as SOPA put an emphasis on piracy, CISPA also appears t... (more)
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. And Congress holds hearings on the TSA while the agency sexually assaults passengers, steals their valuables, torments children, the elderly and handicapped, and spits on the Constitution.
Numerousprogressivecommentators are lambasting the Supreme Court for its 5-4 ruling yesterday in Florence v. Bd. of Chosen Freeholders, and rightfully so. The 5-judge conservative faction held that prison officials may ... (more)
Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, tries to seduce Peter Schiff into going *all the way* - to a truly voluntary society. A spirited debate from the Peter Schiff radio show, April 3, 2012
"Ben Bernake fancies himself as a student of the Great Depression," says renowned investment broker, global strategist, author, and Austrian economist Peter Schiff, "but... if he were my student he would have gotten an F."
During a lecture entitled "The Fed Unspun: The Other Side of the Story", Schiff responded to Bernake's recent four-part college lectu... (more)
Bernanke came out yesterday to say there would be no more QE unless the market slides, the market is now giving him what he wants with stocks down across the board, gold is leading the way down 3.13%.
US President Barack Obama gave a speech accusing Republicans of "social darwinism" with budget cuts they are proposing, calling them antithetical to the country's history as a land of opportunity. But how much opportunity is there left exactly? We speak with Dr. Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom Boom & Doom report. He says that wealth destruction and social unrest may... (more)
It can't be easy to convince millions of subscribers that there's no reason to be worried when their service providers agree to collaborate with big content to tackle online infringement -- especially when those subscribers weren't given a chance to review or comment on the deal. But yesterday's announcement of the membership of the executive and advisory boards for the Center for Copyrigh... (more)
Spain’s Ministry of Culture has just reported on the first month’s activities following the introduction of the country’s ‘Sinde’ anti-piracy law. The controversial legislation, described by some as a Spanish version of SOPA, took effect March 1st and since that time rightsholders have been busy filing notices. Almost 300 complaints have been filed in total including 79 site takedown requests.
After being threatened with a place on a United State... (more)
Does the government have a responsibility to protect innocent third parties from collateral damage when it seizes their property in the course of prosecuting alleged copyright infringement? That is the question a federal district court will consider next week in the latest skirmish in the legal battle between the U.S. government and Megaupload.
When the government shut down Megaupload three months ago, it made it impossible for innocent third parties, like our client Kyle Goodwin,... (more)
The full horror of the federal government’s much-ballyhooed, 40-year-old war on drugs is on display in the case of Ernesto Lira.
Lira’s “crime”?
According to this article in the New York Times, the drug-war gendarmes caught him driving with “three foil-wrapped grams of methamphetamine in his car.”<... (more)
How gigantically humongous and intrusive is the federal government? A traditional measure is to look at the pages of regulations in the Federal Register, which is, by now, probably the world's largest book collection. The problem with this approach is that it takes no account of how a single bad regulation can have monstrously deleterious effects.
Copyright regulation is a good example of this. There was no universal enforcement until the very late part of the 19th century, and te... (more)
There is a new bill in Congress that is expected to pass that would allow the government to suspend your travel outside the country if you owe taxes to the IRS.
Senate Bill 1813 (Highway trust fund), which was passed by the Senate last week and is now pending in the House of Representatives contains a provision that would allow the IRS to order the State Department to refuse to grant, refuse to renew, revoke or restrict the passport of any US citizen which the... (more)
A bill approved by the Arizona House last week will make "telecommunications harassment" -- speech others find offensive or threatening -- a Class 1 misdemeanor punishable by up to 25 years in prison.
Arizona House Bill 2549 passed both legislative houses and is now awaiting signature from Arizona governor Jan Brewer.
The legislation will make it "unlawful for any person, with intent ... (more)
A new bill has passed through the Arizona state legislature that would allow for broad censorship of the internet. As with many such bills, this one is weakly "disguised" as an attempt to deal with online "bullying" and "stalking." However, as with many such attempts to outlaw "being a jerk" online, this one goes way, way too far. It says that it's unlawful to "annoy ... (more)
Americans have until April 17 to file their federal tax returns this year, and ironically, according to the Tax Foundation, the average American will have to work from Jan. 1 until exactly that day just to pay his or her share of the taxes that government will absorb this year.
Each year, the Tax Foundation calculates "Tax Freedom Day." It determines this date by adding up all the taxes Americans pay to local, stat... (more)
The IRS & DEA came to downtown Oakland today to raid multiple medical marijuana dispensaries as well as Oaksterdam, an educational facility that teaches plant cultivation.
Robbie Martin of Media Roots ran to catch the raid and captured an intense standoff between the people and the government officials. He also confronts an ABC 7 news reporter Mark Matth... (more)
