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.

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. 

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- State agencies would be forbidden from further compliance with the federal Real ID Act under a measure the Utah House approved Thursday.

[...]

Opponents call the act an unfunded mandate that tramples on states' rights. A slew of states have already passed laws and resolutions saying they won't comply with any portion of it.

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

By Bruce Schneier, Special to CNN

Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn't that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated -- we knew that already -- it's that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.

In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.