Last month Grant Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words by Border Protection
and carrying the official seal of the Department of Homeland Security — via digg
Greenpeace has laughed off claims by a Japanese whaling organisation that the US Navy is spying on its protest ships in the Southern Ocean. The Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, the group conducting the whaling and the real pirates, claims the information is being gathered for the US Civil Marine Analysis Department’s worldwide report on piracy
More than 500 General Electric employees have sued Monsanto along with two related companies, claiming they were exposed to toxic chemicals manufactured for decades by Monsanto
The UK government has been accused of compiling a national DNA database by stealth as police reported a rapid increase in genetic profiling
US Government backed policy changes have led ICANN to redelegate top level domains in such a way as to provide greater state-controlled censorship on the internet, reduce people’s ability to use the internet to communicate freely, and leave expansion of the internet in the hands of the people least capable of doing the job
Deep in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, West Virginia, hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the United State’s largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a radio quiet
zone, the station’s large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour. Run by the ultra-secret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another NSA listening post, in Yakima, Washington, eavesdrops on the western half of the country. Both are part of ECHELON
The volume of information that the NSA has harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged
The US government has been collecting information on peaceful war protest groups reminiscent of the Vietnam-era investigations. Is anyone surprised? — via morons.org
The US Department of Transportation has been handing millions of dollars to state governments for GPS-tracking pilot projects designed to track vehicles wherever they go. So far, Washington state and Oregon have received fat federal checks to figure out how to levy these mileage-based road user fees
. The Office of Transportation Policy Studies, part of the Federal Highway Administration, is about to announce another round of grants totaling some $11 million — via digg
Using a network of cameras that can record number plates, Britain plans to build a database of vehicle movement for police and security services: rollout begins in March
Local importers have begun filing damages claims worth tens of millions of dollars against the Australian Customs Service after computer glitches left shipping containers filled with Christmas stock stranded on wharves
The House baulked at a Senate plan to extend the USA Patriot Act by six months to give Congress and the retarded monkey boy more time to work out their differences, instead forcing the Senate and the administration to accept a one-month extension
In a delightful example of common sense, Judge John Jones of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruled that intelligent design — which bills itself as a scientific theory and states that life shows signs of being the work of an intelligent designer — is in fact reworked creationism and the loony fundies trying to inflict their insanity on students are blatant liars — via The Pagan Prattle
The US National Security Agency has been caught spying on American citizens. According to numerous un-named sources, the retarded monkey boy signed a secret order authorising him to intercept phone calls and e-mails from US persons in communication with persons outside the US, and all without the slightest bit of judicial oversight. It’s not like this is anything new, it’s just that the targets have changed from those who can help line the pockets of the usual parade of rich, white morons, to those who show an interest in stopping that sort of corruption
The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Colorado says that the names and license plate numbers of about 30 people who protested three years ago in Colorado Springs were put into FBI domestic-terrorism files
Australian Senators wants Australians’ internet connections to be automatically filtered by ISPs. Anyone who wants to view pornography or other adult material
(details not specified) must apply to their ISP to be given access to it. Another step towards becoming a nanny state — via Slashdot
Gay couples are now allowed to legally marry, tying the knot with what is officially known as a civil partnership, and among the first to do so will be veteran rock star Elton John’s civil and long-time love David Furnish
South Africa’s highest court has ruled in favour of same-sex marriages. The Constitutional Court has struck down a law that bans gay unions and ordered Parliament to draft new legislation within a year. Justice Albie Sachs ruled that the common law definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman
is inconsistent with the Constitution because it does not permit same-sex couples to enjoy the same benefits as heterosexual couples
The federal government wants to peer into your computer communications, forcing companies to design, or redesign, their networks to accommodate surveillance. The FCC gave broadband Internet service and voice-over-Internet Protocol services 18 months to ensure that their networks are wiretap-ready — via digg
The recording industry is trying to hijack the EU’s data retention directive, which is being brought in to fight terrorism, to try and get their copyright battles fought for them. The EU may be making copyright infringement a criminal offence, and the Creative Media Business Alliance is lobbying hard to stop the European laws on data retention being restricted to cover terrorism and organised crime. In essence, they want to be able to get police to search through newly extended records from ISPs to look for evidence of illegal filesharing. In the words of the executive director of the Open Rights Group, the music industry’s attempt to hijack this legislation is a travesty and a gross affront to civil liberties and human rights
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