The U.S. House passed wih no debate today HR 4614, a bill which seeks to mandate the collection of DNA samples from people who have been convicted of no crime.

Liberty Coalition now has a page on Facebook where you can follow our latest activities. Follow this link, check it out, and click on "Become a fan"!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Liberty-Coalition/318132301249

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.

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.

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.