If you live in the United States today, you need to understand that your privacy is being constantly eroded. Our world is going crazy, government paranoia is off the charts and law enforcement authorities have become absolutely obsessed with watching us, listening to us, tracking us, recording us, compiling information on all of us and getting us all to spy on one another. If you doubt that we are rapidly getting to the point where the government will monitor every breath you take an... (more)
Correction: headline should read '14 new ways the government is *serving* you.' - Chris
A Cottage Grove man who secretly recorded his interaction with a Eugene police officer on his cell phone during a 2008 traffic stop did not act illegally, the Oregon Court of Appeals has ruled, highlighting the ongoing controversy over how and when residents may record the actions of law enforcement officers.
The Cottage Grove man, 33-year-old Shane Neff, did not act illegally because the officer in question, Sam Ou, was himself recording the conversation on his cruiser’s da... (more)
A man from Pompano Beach, Florida, was arrested and charged with illegal interception of communication on Tuesday when he recorded a conversation with Palm Beach County deputies.
Courts have rule that it is legal to record police under the First Amendment. Carl Paul had questioned the traffic stop and asked police for their names. He was arrested after po... (more)
...Foltz had never been arrested before in Florida, according to state criminal records, and has not been arrested since. The DUI charge against her was dropped.
In her lawsuit against the city, Foltz said that Martens had no probable cause to arrest her. Her description of the incident in the jail is different. Sh
MOBILE, Alabama -- A former Citronelle police officer violated the law when he kept a pair of handguns he took from motorists during his 11-year tenure on the force, a federal jury here decided this afternoon.
The jury convicted Bill Eugene Newburn guilty of 2 counts of possession of a st
Things change, usually for the worse, and always against the innocent. (This truth is a principle of curmudgeonry.) When I came to Mexico some eight years ago, it was a peaceful, moderately successful upper-Third-World country – middle-class, barely, literate, though often barely, and as democratic as the United States, which is to say barely. Things were improving, though often they had a long way to go. The young were visibly healthier than preceding generations. The birth rate ... (more)
Guests checking in at big hotels like the Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, and Holiday Inn will now be met with the face of Janet Napolitano when they turn on their televisions, as Homeland Security’s ‘See Something, Say Something’ snitch campaign continues to expand.
“The Department of Homeland Security is turning to television and public service announcements to urge U.S. hotel guests to fight terrorism,” reports UPI, adding that PSAs encouraging Ame... (more)
Capitol Hill conservatives and Pentagon brass fighting cuts to defense spending have argued that the military is limping off the battlefield with decrepit hardware. It's quite the sob story: At a hearing last week, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), the chair of the House armed services committee, cut his remarks short to literally cry for "these young men that are going outside the wire ov... (more)
It is not too often I am pleased by the foreign policy announcements from this administration, but last week's announcement that the war in Iraq was in its final stage and all the troops may be home for Christmas did sound promising. I have long said that we should simply declare victory and come home. It should not have taken us nearly a decade to do so, and it was supposed to be a priority for the new administration. Instead, it will be one of the last things done before the critical ... (more)
I think I know some lab mice that have received less examination than the 2012 Republican primary candidates. It seems with each passing cycle, the campaigning starts earlier, there are more debates, and the media frenzy gets more intense. Yet, with all the pyrotechnics and pageantry, it becomes difficult to figure out what these tricksters actually think when they're behind the curtain. Since the gold price is inextricably linked to the long-term fate of the US dollar, it's rather im... (more)
The most accurate forecasters say gold will rebound from its biggest monthly plunge since 2008 and reach a record by March because economic growth is stagnating and Europe’s debt crisis is unresolved.
Futures traded in New York may rise 13 percent to $1,950 an ounce by the end of the first quarter, according to the median of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The predictions are from eight of the top 10 analysts tracked by Bloomberg over the past eight quarters. Two declined t... (more)
Nov 2, 2011 - International investor Jim Rogers argues the U.S. markets are inferior to Europe and the next economic slowdown will be much worse than 2008.
This video appears to have been held secretly since 2004, it was just released on YouTube by the Judge's daughter who is the victim, the abuser in this case is still an actively "serving" Judge, you can see his picture here on the county's website.
This video is going super-viral and is currently on the front page of reddit, the daughter in the... (more)
That's what Novato resident Moriah Stafford learned when she found an iPhone in a shopping cart at a Marin County Kohl's store on Sept. 20.
Stafford took the phone to her son's Petaluma home, thinking he could help her try to contact the owner. Next thing she knew, Sonoma County sheriff's deputie
Do you want to feel optimistic about the U.S. economy? If so, you might not want to read the rest of this article. In many areas of the United States today, you can almost smell the fear and the anxiety in the air. Survey after survey has found that the American people are extremely pessimistic about the direction the economy is headed. In fact, many recent surveys have found that economic pessimism is at the highest levels ever recorded. There has been an astonishi... (more)
Do you hear that sound? It is the sound of Europe being hit with a cold dose of financial reality. The air has been let out of the balloon, and investors all over the world are realizing that absolutely nothing has been solved in Europe. The solutions being proposed by the politicians in Europe are just going to make things worse. You don't solve a sovereign debt crisis by shredding confidence in sovereign debt. But that is exactly what the "voluntary 50% haircut" has done. You don't solve... (more)
Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed in American cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making “security announcements” and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they are also capable of “recording conversations,” bringing the potential privacy threat posed by ‘Intellistreets’ to a whole new level.
In the days after we first brought attention to the privacy concerns surrounding the new street lights, with our sto... (more)
The wave of civil unrest that has swept the globe over the past year has prompted the Department of Homeland Security to step up its monitoring of Twitter and other social networks in a bid to pre-empt any sign of social dislocation within the United States.
“Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the use of such technology in uprisings that started in December in Tunisia shocked some officials into attention and prompted questions of whether the U... (more)
