I confess I have mixed feelings about gun control. On the one hand you have situations like the recent shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where something clearly needs to be done to protect children against mass murder. That one seems like a no-brainer. On the other hand, I don’t trust the 1% and …
Category Archive: Police State
Nov 07 2012
What to do in your second term
Congratulations on your re-election, Mr. President. I’m glad you got a second term, because there are still a few items that need to be finished up from your first one. And now that you don’t have to worry about being re-elected, I hope you’ll have the time, the freedom, and the will to fix some …
Oct 26 2012
Mother convicted of “disorderly conduct” for refusing TSA grope.
The Tennessean reports that a Clarksville mom has been found guilty of “disorderly conduct” for refusing to participate in an unconstitutional violation of her right to privacy, otherwise known as a TSA “pat-down”. Transportation Security Officer Karen King testified that before the pat-down, Abbott yelled in her face that she didn’t want anyone “touching her …
Sep 19 2012
Spirit of the Sith
Today’s link goes to Mano Singham’s post, The Obama administration considers constitutional rights to be dangerous. The administration is correct: constitutional rights are dangerous, at least to those who are exploiting others from positions of privilege and power. But the absence of rights is far more dangerous, in terms of the scope and extent of …
Aug 23 2012
Stray thoughts: congressional review of state secrets
If you’ve been reading Ed Brayton’s blog, you know that one of the big problems with the current administration, like administration before it, is a penchant for using the so-called State Secret Privilege to avoid accountability for any questionable activities it might be engaging in. In fact, if anything, the current administration is even worse …
Aug 14 2012
White House pulls plug on popular petition (or does it?)
The Electronic Privacy Information Center reports a disturbing but sadly unsurprising development in the struggle to recover our civil liberties. At approximately 11:30 am EDT, the White House removed a petition about the TSA airport screening procedures from the White House “We the People” website. About 22,500 of the 25,000 signatures necessary for a response …
Aug 10 2012
More state-sponsored malware discovered.
Having problems with your computer? You may have a virus paid for by taxpayer dollars. A newly uncovered espionage tool, apparently designed by the same people behind the state-sponsored Flame malware that infiltrated machines in Iran, has been found infecting systems in other countries in the Middle East, according to researchers. The malware, which steals …
Aug 08 2012
4th Amendment protections officially moot
Wired magazine reports the depressing news that we now officially have fewer constitutional rights than we did under Bill Clinton. The federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a decision reversing the first and only case that successfully challenged President …
Jul 06 2012
Government considers calculated misinformation to fight insider leaks
Computer scientists call it it “Fog Computing” — a play on today’s cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm, researchers say they’ve built “a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation … and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this ‘disinformation technology.’” …
Jul 02 2012
Wiretap requests down 14%
Networkworld.com is reporting a 14% drop in state and federal wiretap requests compared to a year ago. According to a report issued by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts a total of 2,732 wiretap applications were authorized in 2011 by federal and state courts, with 792 applications by federal authorities and 1,940 applications …
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