Issues

Justice Dept promises not to plunder Census data

March 4, 2010 - 8:54pm

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. 

EFF receives documentation of hundreds of possibly illegal Pentagon activities

March 2, 2010 - 5:23pm

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.

Another dubious database

March 2, 2010 - 4:59pm

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.

More money for 'fusion centers'

February 24, 2010 - 3:07pm

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.