Cook County, Illinois has spent about $45 million dollars in DHS funds to set up a vast surveillance camera network. But the project has been a miserable failure, and so the county is pulling the plug. I wonder what that $45 million could have been used for instead.
Salon's Glenn Greenwald reports that the Obama administration has finished its investigation of lower-level CIA agents involved in the torture of prisoners, and has found all but two of the 101 cases brought before the DOJ aren't worthy of further investigation. The two cases Holder will investigate involve the brutal deaths of prisoners.
In the latest Congressional move related to consumer data privacy, two House Republicans of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Greg Walden and Mary Bono, have scheduled a consumer data privacy hearing for July 14. This is just another sign that Congress will likely pass some kind of consumer data privacy legislation soon.
Read this for a laugh. It's an Arizona fusion center's description of how an undercover surveillance operation of a non-violent political demonstration was interrupted by a counter-surveillance operation. It ends with someone calling the police on the police.
As ZDNet reports, Microsoft has come clean and admitted that your EU-based cloud data isn't safe from sneaky US government spying authorized by the USA Patriot Act. Companies don't like to admit this, but it's true for basically any data on the internet, if the company that holds it (think Google) is based in the US.
The Guardian's John Harris reports that surveillance of schoolchildren in the United States is on the rise. He cites numerous examples to demonstrate that schools are becoming more and more like prisons, to the detriment of children and our society. Many people wonder how social media applications like Facebook are affecting the way in which youth view privacy in the digital age. But another concern is direct government surveillance.
The Metro reported yesterday that Boston commuters can expect to be surveilled more closely than ever before, thanks to a flood of DHS money for surveillance cameras on trains and buses in the metro area. The MBTA even wants to install cameras inside train cars, the better to see you reading your phone with? Apparently, there are already cameras inside some Orange and Red line cars.
Do you use the free, online service "Instapaper"? If you don't, you might want to. It's a great way to manage the loads of information the internet throws at us each day. It's simple: when you have an Instapaper account, you can put a shortcut in your browser bookmarks. Whenever you come upon an article you'd like to read but don't have time for at the moment, you click the shortcut and it saves the article to your Instapaper account. You can then access it, even without an internet connection.
The Project on Government Oversight has long sought a crucial Department of Defense Inspector General report on the Thomas Drake affair. Now, only after Drake agreed to plead to a misdemeanor, which he did only after the government's case fell apart, the DOD has released the report. Surprise, surprise: it proves Drake was telling the truth, and was simply trying to point out massive government waste.