Big Government by the GOP

Not in the boardroom but in your bedroom.



Link from here.

The pile of bodies is getting hard to ignore

JJ of Unrepentant Old Hippie keeps track of the horrible misuse of Tasers by police, and the people they have murdered.



Update 11/25:
The UN says that Tasers are torture:

TASER electronic stun guns are a form of torture that can kill, a UN committee has declared after several recent deaths in North America.

"The use of these weapons causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture,'' the UN's Committee against Torture said.

"In certain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life events,'' the committee of 10 experts said.

Three men, all in their early 20s, were reported to have died in the United States this week, days after a Polish man died at Vancouver airport after being Tasered by Canadian police.

Write clearly

So the FBI can understand it. Don't want the IM from the babysitter to be mistranslated as you exclaim over the amount found in the diaper..... could be taken as code, you know....

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.

Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.

Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what's legally permissible.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.)

That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.

(link via Mustang Bobby)

For the NSA, FBI, CIA, and the rest of the alphabet

skippy the bush kangaroo likes "the government disclaimer that lambert puts at the bottom of all his emails":

(confidential to all us government personnel to whom this private letter is not addressed and who are reading it in the absence of a specific search warrant: you are violating the law and you are co-conspiring to subvert the constitution that you are sworn to defend.

you can either refuse to commit this crime, or you can expect to suffer criminal sanctions in the future, when constitutional government has been restored to the united states of america. i do not envy you for having to make this difficult choice, but i urge you to make it wisely.)

Find yourself ... or your neighbors.... on the net

For free.

Zabasearch.

Intelius.

From this blog here.

Crossing the border demands more than just a passport

it demands details of your last lunch, your political beliefs, your reading material... and all of it will be used against you by anyone with access to your files:

Sara at Orcinus:
"And now it turns out that, for the past four years, all this information, some factual, some inferred, has been compiled into a superfile that -- unlike my driving record, my medical file, or my credit rating -- is completely out of my ability to view, correct, or control. Every time I cross that border or get on an airplane, I'm adding another data point to its detailed and growing portrait of my life. If the border guard is feeling cranky, he can take the time to read the screen in greater detail, and harass me about the things he finds "of interest." And it does happen: the "Why did you move to Canada?" guy went on to ask a lot of other questions about our political beliefs, more than hinting that he found the idea of Americans choosing to live elsewhere deeply offensive and suspicious. He did not approve of our choice; and he was determined to make us answer to him for it. For about five seconds, we considered discussing his attitude with his supervisor -- and then realized that even that very reasonable step would likely get us written up in a file somewhere (and now we know exactly where) as activist malcontents, and subjected to much worse harassment in the future. But keeping silent is always a mistake, too: because we didn't do that, he's probably out there on the job today, adding who knows what to the files of those unlucky enough to end up at his booth.

The thought that would-be stormtroopers like this one, based on secret information and a whim, could detain me, restrict my access to the country of my birth, put my US assets and mail beyond reach, charge me in secret, and deport me for extrajudicial "treatment" is terrifying. And all this inferential "data" is, day by day, making its way into other databases, where it will be seen (according to the AP) by employers, lower-level governments, contracting agencies, and people who issue licenses. Lies and whispers, hints and allegations -- yet they may someday, without our even being aware of it, determine which of us gets a job, a loan, a university acceptance, a government contract, a business license.

Is it worth exposing myself to all this just to go get my damned mail? It's a question I've started asking myself every time I pull into the southbound customs line to wait for my welcome home.

Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont has promised to institute oversight on the ATS program in the new year."