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.
The US Supreme Court has decided that Vermont can't legally prohibit the data mining of drug prescription information. Marketers, government spies, and blackmail artists = 1. Regular folk = 0.
The indispensible Glenn Greenwald, of Salon.com, describes the recent arrests of two US-based Iraqi citizens on terrorism charges and explains what 'terrorism' really means.
Researcher Chrisopher Soghoian began filing public records requests to federal law enforcement agencies in 2009, seeking records showing how much the agencies have paid in retreival fees to telecommunications companies. He's hoping to find some answers to the question: how often do these agencies ask AT&T and other telecoms for the personal data of consumers?
And it can! Scary news from the DARPA crates is making the rounds on the internet, radio and television news. Check it out here.
In her address to the Brennan Center in New York earlier this week, DHS director Janet Napolitano admitted that up to 80 percent of terror cases have been interrupted due to either citizen vigilance or to community policing. She said:
That's the conclusion reached by an independent UN investigator charged with looking into the practice of banning people from the internet after "three strikes" of copyright infringement. The practice is law in the UK and France.
What do you think? Should the government be allowed to prevent people from accessing the internet if they are repeat copyright infringers? The US government doesn't think so.
Read more at ArsTechnica.
Wyden's bill would require that law enforcement get a warrant in order to access your GPS data from telecommunications companies. Right now all they need is a subpoena, which a judge has never seen. He has support from Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who ArsTechnica reports said:
"I take the Fourth Amendment very seriously. The law enforcement community is going too far..I happen to think that's wrong."