Scout's Honor

8 year old Cub Scout on TSA watch list.

The Watchers

Security camera software to fight future crime?

CCTV security systems could soon spot an assault on a bus before it happens, according to a major research project.

Full Moon Fever

Canadians to bare their bums in protest of US spying?

A Canadian man is planning what local press called a "moon mission" in protest of a U.S. spy balloon being tested for the Department of Homeland Security. In other words, when the balloon flies, he and other Canadians (he hopes) will give its operators a glimpse at how they feel about the aerial spying.

Cops in Hot Water

UK cops waterboarding pot suspects?

Future Crime

Cops ID 200 schoolchildren as potential future terrorists.

The programme, run by the Association of Chief Police Officers, asks teachers, parents and other community figures to be vigilant for signs that may indicate an attraction to extreme views or susceptibility to being "groomed" by radicalisers.

Trashy Move

UK trashcans spy on homeowners.

Two million households now have microchips in their bins in a move by councils that paves the way for the introduction of a pay-as-you-throw bin tax.

Cop on Tape

Cop arrests priest for filming them.

A police report says the Rev. James Manship was confronted and arrested Feb. 19 because he was holding an "unknown shiny silver object" and struggled with an officer who was trying to take it from him. But a 15-second video released this week by Manship's attorneys shows East Haven police Officer David Cari asking Manship, "Is there a reason you have a camera on me?"

"I'm taking a video of what's going on here," Manship replies.

"Well, I'll tell you what, what I'm going to do with that camera," Cari says as he approaches the priest. The tape then goes blank.

Order of Fear

Governments exploited fear of terror.

Former MI5 boss Dame Stella Rimington has accused the Government of exploiting people's fear of terrorism to restrict civil liberties.

She said ministers risked handing a victory to terrorists by making people "live in fear and under a police state".

Dame Stella, who stood down as the Security Service's director general in 1996, also accused the US of going too far.

She claimed the Guantanamo Bay camp and allegations of torture had acted as a recruiting sergeant for extremists.

The Fear Years

8 Years of Fear, a documentary from Russia Today.

Kiss Off

Mall cops arrest women for kissing?

Jessica Garcia intends to prove in court that security officers at Rolling Oaks Mall unfairly targeted her and her girlfriend when they were arrested in December on trespassing and other charges.

Garcia said the officers — a Bexar County sheriff's deputy and an employee from a private security company — began harassing them Dec. 26 because her girlfriend gave her a kiss on the cheek while sitting inside the mall on a bench.

Mall officials said the women, both 22, were acting inappropriately and were told to leave because they were not complying with the shopping center's code of conduct.

Whistle Stop

NSA whistleblower Russel Tice interviewed on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Fishing for Freedom

Anglers unite against EU's proposal "for recreational fishermen to register their boat as a fishing vessel and record their catch as part of the UK's annual quota for certain species".

Crappy Coworkers

Former Gitmo guard calls coworkers "psychotic".

"It's torture," Chris Arendt, who worked at Guantanamo when he was 19, told the BBC in this video. "It's a means of extracting information that I didn't even believe these people probably had. It's a means of making their lives more miserable."

Arendt, who joined the U.S. military when he was 17, testified at the Winter Soldier Hearings in Washington D.C. last March.

Wearing an Iraq Veterans Against the War sweatshirt, Arendt told the BBC that many people he worked with at the camp thought of their Guantanamo posting as "vacation."

"...This was the opportunity that they'd always wanted, to be violent and awful people...because they are genuinely pyschotic. And for others, it's just a job," Arendt said.

Order Out of Chaos

The US Army is ready to deal with civil unrest as the economy heads south.

Save the Homophobes

Pope says humanity needs protection from homosexual behavior.

Pope Benedict said on Monday that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

"The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less."

This is a joke, right? I'm going to go out and offer my gay friends head right now.

Unhappy Hour

Britain considering a ban on happy hour in an effort to curb drinking related deaths.

Britain is considering a ban on "happy hour" discounts at bars and restaurants to curb drinking, a spokesman said Saturday, as health advocates warned that a rise in liver-related deaths among young people may signal a future epidemic.

Ambushed

A journalist's Obama election celebration ends in jail.

Even the police were swept up in the mood, smiling and posing for photos. An occasional handful of students would venture into the streets to high-five enthusiastic, honking motorists, only to be waved back by the police, but otherwise, it was as peaceful and well-behaved as a high school pep rally.

Then I looked up the street, to where the police had blocked off St. Paul Street with almost a dozen cruisers. A phalanx of about a dozen cops had lined up.

They began marching, and I saw one of the cops holding a pile of plastic flexicuffs. No one had a bullhorn or a PA. They just moved into the crowd and started yelling at people. There was no clear officer in charge, just a group of belligerent, angry police.

My brother came running up the sidewalk. "Some guy just got tasered!" he said. I saw some cops walking back toward us, so I crossed the street to stay out of their way. The first arrestees were being led to the paddy wagon. I pulled out my cell phone and started snapping pictures.

A beefy officer saw me taking photos and approached. I held my hands at my side and said, "I'm a journalist. I'm just taking pictures."

He slapped my cell phone out of my hand and grabbed my shirt. "Well, write a nice, long story about this," he said, spinning me around as another officer cuffed me. I was in the paddy wagon before I could even comprehend what was happening. After processing at Northern District I was thrown into a concrete cell, strip-searched, fingerprinted, and subject to the singular degradation of a long night spent in Central Booking.

Read the entire story here.

Staged Fright

Did cops stage a violent confrontation during Democratic convention?

Human Tracking

Sex offenders to be tracked by satellite?

Who's Watching the Watchers?

An image of Gordon Brown made up of photos of CCTV cameras.

Global Meltdown

Something of interest finally slips out of Glenn Beck's giant trap:

"There is a global meltdown coming. It is global depression. And one world currency and one world financial system is the endgame."

Skype Gripe

Chinese Skype users are being watched.

Users of Chinese Skype are being monitored by an extensive surveillance system which tracks and archives the online messages for words deemed politically sensitive, according to a report.

Martial Law

Congress told to vote for bailout or face martial law?

Pigs in Mud

Thug police revel in their own brutality.

The Denver police union is selling T-shirts that poke fun at protesters at last month's Democratic National Convention, but the main target isn't laughing.

The back of the shirts reads, "We get up early to beat the crowds" and "2008 DNC," and has a caricature of a police officer holding a baton.

Nothing but a paid gang.

Bulletproof

I wish Frank were still with us.

Killer Television

Owners of satellite television channels in Saudi Arabia who broadcast "immoral" content can be killed.

Saudi Arabia's top judiciary official has issued a religious decree saying it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV networks that broadcast immoral content.

The 79-year-old Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan said Thursday that satellite channels cause the "deviance of thousands of people."

Many of the most popular Arab satellite networks - which include channels showing music videos often denounced as obscene by Muslim conservatives - are owned by Saudi princes and well-connected Saudi businessmen. Al-Lihedan did not specify any particular channels.

Read more here.

Beat the Press

St. Paul officials are feeling the heat after what may have been an orchestrated round-up of journalists covering the Republican's convention.

Journalists and St. Paul citizens assembled outside St. Paul City Hall today to deliver more than 60,000 letters to Mayor Chris Coleman and prosecuting attorneys demanding that they immediately drop charges against all journalists arrested this week as they covered the Republican National Convention

By Friday morning, dozens of journalists, photographers, bloggers and videomakers had been booked by the Ramsey County Sheriff's office in what appears to have been an orchestrated round-up of media makers covering protests during the convention.

"From the pre-convention raids to the ongoing harassment and arrests of journalists, these have been dark days for press freedom in the United States," said Nancy Doyle Brown of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, who delivered the letters on behalf of the nonpartisan media reform group Free Press.

"Tragically, there are stories that the world needed to hear this week that will never be told," Brown said. "They won't be told because reporters working on them were sitting in the back of squad cars, were stripped of their cameras, or were face down on the pavement with their hands cuffed behind their backs."

Read more here.

Abducted at the RNC

Were protesters of the RNC abducted by police?

A half-dozen representatives of the so-called Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee met with the media in a St. Paul, MN press conference on Thursday to condemn the widescale police raids and arrests that have targeted protesters in that city this week.

The strongest accusations were made by RNC Welcoming Committee co-founder William Gillis, who has been among those planning the protests for the last two years.

"Police kicked down doors with guns drawn on families with their children at dinnertime," Gillis charged. "Reporters and the media at large have been repeatedly targeted for repression. Activists have been abducted off the street in unmarked vans and political prisoners held without access to medical attention."

Under Your Skin

Folks in Mexico are getting microchipped.

Affluent Mexicans, terrified of soaring kidnapping rates, are spending thousands of dollars to implant tiny transmitters under their skin so satellites can help find them tied up in a safe house or stuffed in the trunk of a car.

More people, including a growing number of middle-class Mexicans, are seeking out the tiny chip designed by Xega, a Mexican security firm whose sales jumped 13 percent this year. The company said it had more than 2,000 clients.

The Classrooms Have Eyes

CCTV cameras spying on UK students.

CCTV monitors classrooms at one in 14 schools, according to a survey.

The poll of teachers also found that almost a quarter feared there might be more cameras hidden around the campus that they did not know about.

Most said their schools were fitted with surveillance cameras. Almost 80 per cent said there were cameras at the entrance and more than 7 per cent said there were some in classrooms.

Nearly 10 per cent of teachers polled by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers said there were cameras in the lavatories.

Land of the Pee

A short but sweet video revealing the truth about cannabis, marijuana & its prohibition.



From the film: 1 in every 40 prisoners is a marijuana offender. The US is world's biggest jailer.

No More Games

A board game has been seized by police in the name of fighting terror.



Police in Kent, UK arrested some climate protestors and confiscated their "criminal" equipment, including a satirical boardgame about the war on terror. The police claim that the ski mask that came with the game could be used in a criminal act.

Whew, I feel safer already.

Bad Camp

"Concentration camp" for DNC protesters?

In Denver, police are preparing what a local political organizer calls a 'concentration camp', laying in wait for mass arrests anticipated during the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

On Wednesday, a Denver CBS affiliate sent a news crew to crash the police department's improvised detention facility, found in a warehouse owned by the city on the north-east side of town.

"This is a building filled with metal holding cells," described reporter Rick Sallinger, introducing the segment. "We showed up at the facility unannounced today, the doors were wide open, and we managed to shoot for several minutes until a Denver sheriff's captain asked us to leave."

Footage of the warehouse revels tall, chain-link fence capped by barbed wire, and segmented pens each bearing an identifying letter at about shoulder height.

"Each of these fenced in areas is about five yards by five yards," said Sallinger. "There's a lock on the door. How long those arrested will be kept here is not known. A sign on the wall reads, 'Warning! Electric stun devices used in this facility.'"

Prison Fat Camp

Fat kids in the UK should be taken from parents?

Grossly overweight children may be taken from their families and put into care if Britain’s obesity epidemic continues to escalate, council chiefs said yesterday.

Thugs of the State

This Big Brother shit is getting out of hand...

On 24 July it was reported that a painter and decorator called Gordon Williams was given an on-the-spot fine of £30 by Ceredigion council officials, after they observed him smoking a cigarette in his blue Suzuki van. You see, the officials had determined that this van was his "place of work" and therefore Mr Williams was breaking the new law banning all smoking in the workplace.

On 25 July it was reported that Haringey council officials had fined a boutique owner called Sangita Ibrahim for putting out her rubbish in black bin bags, rather than the grey sacks required by the council. The officials fined Ms Ibrahim £300 – made up of four fines of £75, one for each offending bag of the offending colour. Nicole Rosbrook, who works at the boutique, told the London Evening Standard: "The two guys who came in were incredibly rude to us – and to the customers. We were shocked, especially when they turned on the customers."

She added that "We had repeatedly asked the council for a delivery of grey bags, but it never came, so we had to use ordinary black bags. The two men actually went through the bags, leaving them open and rubbish strewn all over the pavement."

Read more here.

Raid

SWAT team raids mayor's house, kills his dogs in drug investigation.

A Maryland mayor is asking the federal government to investigate why SWAT team members burst into his home without knocking and shot his two dogs to death in an investigation into a drug smuggling scheme.

The raid last week was led by the Prince George's County Police Department, with the sheriff's special operations team assisting, after a package of marijuana was sent to Calvo's home.

Authorities say the package was part of a scheme in which drugs are mailed to unknowing recipients and then intercepted.

Despotism or Democracy Quiz?

A film from 1946.

Watching the Watchers

Security cameras to be installed in some UK movie theaters.

Unreasonable Search & Seizure

Flying into the US? Kiss your laptop goodbye.

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Read more here.

Dark Forces

Would both McCain and Obama like to see militarized domestic security forces?

Appearing before the Urban League this week, John McCain revealed his plan for imposing a military dictatorship in "high crime neighborhoods" in the United States.

On the other side of the fixed race, we have Obama's Hitlerjugend, a "national security force… as big, powerful and well-funded as our combined U.S. military forces".

Read more here.

This Week's Headlies

Cops Gone Wild!

Have you seen this video?

Media Kings

Former Governor, pro-wrestler, and actor Jesse Ventura talks with Howard Stern about 9/11, the wars, and politics.



Find part two here.

Shocker

Cops Taser kid with broken back 19 times.

Why You Should Never Talk to the Cops

These guys say you should never, ever talk to the police.

Watch part 2 here.

Strangling the Net

We're making global connections, spreading information, learning and growing over the internet. Our masters just cannot have that.

In the upcoming weeks watch for a report in Time Magazine that will attempt to smooth over the rough edges of a diabolical plot by Bell Canada and Telus, to begin charging per site fees on most Internet sites. The plan is to convert the Internet into a cable-like system, where customers sign up for specific web sites, and then pay to visit sites beyond a cutoff point.

Read more here.

Roadblocks

Kentucky state police set up checkpoints in an effort to "save fuel"?

Expect fewer state troopers driving Kentucky's highways this summer -- and more checkpoints -- courtesy of rising gas prices.

Kentucky State Police announced yesterday that starting July 4, the agency will scale back patrols and set up at least 200 checkpoints to reduce the amount of gas officers are burning on state roads.

The new enforcement policy, which will continue through Labor Day, is an attempt to curtail costs. State police spent $132,000 more for gas this May than during the same time last year, despite using 6 percent less gas.

"We're trying to let traffic come to us instead of us seeking traffic," state police Capt. Tim Lucas said.

Who do they think they're kidding? This isn't about saving gas, it's about conditioning.

Comply or Resist

China's All-Seeing Eye

China's setting up a high-tech police state with the help of US businesses.

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world.

Read more @ Rolling Stone

Private Prints

Your printer can't keep a secret.

More manufacturers are outfitting greater numbers of laser printers with technology that leaves microscopic yellow dots on each printed page to identify the printer’s serial number — and ultimately, you, says the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the leading watchdogs of electronic privacy.

Tase Phase

Nova Scotia is restricting police use of Tasers.

Nova Scotia has placed an immediate interim restriction on the use of Tasers to "situations of violent or aggressive resistance or active threat that may cause serious injury" to a police officer or another person.

The review was prompted by the death in custody in Halifax last November of Howard Hyde after he was shocked with a Taser.

Mine Your Own Business

The Federal Trade Commission indicated Wednesday that it would leave it to data-mining Web companies and Internet marketers to decide how best to protect users' privacy.

"Self-regulation may be the preferable approach for this dynamic marketplace," Lydia Parnes, the director of the commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection, told a Senate committee.

The FTC's decision not to step in — even as Microsoft and Google representatives testified that some regulation would be helpful — means that Washington won't address the matter before a new administration and Congress take office in January.

Read more here.

Digital Rebels

Blogging is getting to be a dangerous hobby in Iran.

New legislation has been proposed in Iran that could make blogging a crime punishable by death.

School Daze

This is funny in a sad way...

License to Hug

You may need to take a test before you can have contact with kids or kiss your own child in public.

The launch of a new Government agency will see 11.3million people vetted for any criminal past before they are approved to have contact with children aged under 16.

But the increase in child protection measures is so great it is "poisoning" relationships between the generations, according to respected sociologist Professor Frank Furedi.

This is the part that gets me:

In one example, a woman could not kiss her daughter goodbye on a school trip because she had not been vetted.

In [another] example, a father was given "filthy looks" by a group of mothers when he took his child swimming on his own...

Prof Furedi details how one woman was made to feel like a "second class mother" because she was barred from a school disco because she did not have a CRB check.

Read more here. WTF are we becoming?

Are You Negative?

NYC wants every Bronx adult to have an HIV test.

Hat Ban

Hats banned in Yorkshire pubs so Big Brother can identify you easier.

The measure, designed to prevent people from obscuring their faces from CCTV cameras, has been questioned by Barnsley's former Test umpire Dickie Bird, 75, well-known for his favoured white flat cap.

He said: "Asking a Yorkshireman to take off his flat cap - whoever heard of anything so silly.

1984 or 2008?

1 surveillance camera for every 14 people

Fish & Chips

Is the British government developing a plan to microchip prisoners?

As a way to reduce prison crowding, many British prisoners are currently released under electronic monitoring, carried out by means of an ankle bracelet that transmits signals like those used by mobile phones.

Now the Ministry of Justice is exploring the possibility of injecting prisoners in the back of the arm with a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that contains information about their name, address and criminal record. Such chips, which contain a built-in antenna, could be scanned by special readers.

This is from the author of the previous RFID article.

Backpack Trackpack

Bookbags with microchips will soon be hitting the hallways of some Rhode Island schools.

A Rhode Island school district has announced a pilot program to monitor student movements by means of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips implanted in their schoolbags.

The Middletown School District, in partnership with MAP Information Technology Corp., has launched a pilot program to implant RFID chips into the schoolbags of 80 children at the Aquidneck School. Each chip would be programmed with a student identification number, and would be read by an external device installed in one of two school buses. The buses would also be fitted with global positioning system (GPS) devices.

Parents or school officials could log onto a school web site to see whether and when specific children had entered or exited which bus, and to look up the bus’s current location as provided by the GPS device.

The Pain Ray

Our loving masters have created a new weapon to deal with unruly crowds who dare to venture from their "free speech zones". Meet the Pain Ray.

Yes, folks, originally designed to protect military personnel against small-arms fire without the use of lethal force, Silent Guardian, ADS, the Pain Ray, call it what you will, (Raytheon would prefer you not to use the latter however), will finally soon be here!

Transmitted at the speed of light over a 700 yard distance, the Pain Ray is a millimeter-wave beam that penetrates 1/64th of an inch beneath the skin, causing the water molecules there to bubble, producing an intense burning sensation, said to feel like being burnt by molten lava or a hot iron. Its delivery system attached to a Humvee and aimed right, the Pain Ray makes people run away -- fast.

Mixed Messages

Hey teacher, leave those kids alone!

Kids love using their cell phones to send text messages. But now Manatee County has a new rule that say if teachers think the students are up to no good, those texts can be read. "If we suspect kids are plotting together and we have that suspicion, we’ll search that," said School Board attorney John Bowen.

Read more here. I don't like the idea of teachers reading private messages, but at the same time kids shouldn't be fucking around on phones during class.

The Internet of Things

You won't just be on the grid, you'll be in the grid, wearing the grid, eating and drinking the grid. Is the ultimate surveillance society being created?

With video surveillance cameras protruding from every building it isn’t very hard to figure out that you are being watched, but with the internet of things the surveillance grid is merged seamlessly and invisibly into the entire environment. In an internet of things, every object, as well as people who are wearing RFID tagged clothes or are using electronic devices, would be “readable” by a computer or wireless network. The object’s (or person’s) details, exact location and other information could be obtained electronically by invisible sensors in sidewalks, roads, or doorways.

Forced Labor

Unemployed young adults in the UK to be forced into "boot camps"?

A future Conservative government will bring in "boot camps" for unemployed young people aged between 18 and 21 who refuse to take a job, Chris Grayling, the party's welfare spokesman, will say tomorrow.

Read more here