Creeping Totalitarianism

So, a few months ago, I wrote a post about sequestration in which I said, basically, bring it on!I had a couple of reasons for saying that. First of all, from my libertarian point of view some of the threatened cuts were pretty awesome. The Obama administration was threatening to cut federal grants to law enforcement, the TSA, Customs and Border Protection, and especially … [Read more...] about Heads They Win, Tails You Lose

So this story just makes me feel miserable: The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.David Miranda, who lives with Glenn … [Read more...] about Checkpoints And Despotism

In the early days of the Usenet distributed bulletin board system, some of us used to include random  collections of suspicious-sounding keywords in everything we posted (usually in the signature block). We did this because we were paranoid enough to assume government agencies were watching everyone's posts, and we thought it would be funny to sneak tons of spurious messages … [Read more...] about Nuclear Terrorism Espionage

When I read that the Supreme Court had decided it's okay to take DNA swabs from people who are arrested but not yet convicted, I was a bit peeved because it seemed they had chipped away one more bit of our Fourth Amendment rights.Still, it seemed like a relatively small thing. After all, they already take fingerprints when you're arrested, and DNA is kind of like a newer, … [Read more...] about Why Routine DNA Gathering Is a Dangerous Change

Michael Galindo has a hobby taking pictures of storms as a volunteer for the National Weather Service's Skywarn program. On September 13 he took a few pictures of a brewing storm which, unknown to him, happened to be near the Lyondell Refinery outside Houston. And I wouldn't be mentioning this if it hadn't taken an ugly turn: A man who snapped photos of a brewing storm last … [Read more...] about The FBI Questions a Stormwatcher