Blog Entries

Latest surveillance tech: Portable license-plate scanners

March 4, 2010 - 9:25pm

The latest in police/revenuer surveillance technology?  Read all about it in The USA Today:

The cameras read license plates of parked and moving cars — hundreds per minute — and check them against vehicle databases, said Lance Clem, a spokesman for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which purchased several systems for its police vehicles last fall.[...]

Another dubious database

March 2, 2010 - 5:59pm

The NYPD has stopped, harrassed and frisked nearly three million people without probable cause over the past six years.  Bob Herbert has more in the New York Times:

Police Department statistics show that 2,798,461 stops were made in that six-year period. In 2,467,150 of those instances, the people stopped had done nothing wrong. That’s 88.2 percent of all stops over six years. Black people were stopped during that period a staggering 1,444,559 times. Hispanics accounted for 843,817 of the stops and whites 287,218.

Another PATRIOT Act extension.

February 25, 2010 - 4:31pm

Last night, the U.S. Senate passed -- on unanimous consent and no recorded vote -- a measure to renew some expiring police-state provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act for another year. The U.S. House is scheduled to vote on the extension tonight. The White House has promised to sign the bill.

Call your Congressman's office (the Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121) today and urge a NO vote.

Background here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR201002...

More money for 'fusion centers'

February 24, 2010 - 4:07pm

The Obama Administration's Attorney General this week enthusiastically endorsed the Bush Administratoin's police-state creations known as "fusion centers."  These operations centers merging federal, state and local police agencies have come under fire for targeting the Administration's political enemies as potential terrorists.