The Assistant Attorney General has sent a letter to concerned members of Congress   insisting that personal data collected on Americans by the U.S. Census Bureau will not be disclosed to "law enforcement or national security officials."  This is a commendable position.  It would be nice if the NSA Director released a similar letter.

This concern would not be so pronounced if the Census stuck to their Constitutional mandate in the first place and only inquired as to the number of persons in the household. 

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.[...]

Our friends at ACLU have put up a petition to Google to not enter into a data-sharing agreement with the military. Check out the interactive petition form here.

Our vigilant partners at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have forced hundreds of documents from the Pentagon concerning spying on U.S. persons.  What follows is the full story from EFF's website:
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The Department of Defense has released more than 800 heavily-redacted pages of intelligence oversight reports, detailing activities that its Inspector General has “reason to believe are unlawful.” The reports are the latest in an ongoing document release by more than a half-dozen intelligence agencies in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by EFF in July 2009.

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.

March 1, 2010

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

In November 2009, many of the undersigned organizations wrote to you to express our concern over the lack of nominations to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). We write again, with increased urgency, to encourage you to appoint individuals immediately.

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...

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.