The Bush regime has been notorious from the beginning for violating a basic federal law, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (44 USC 2201-2207), which states that all presidential correspondence and communications must be permanently archived. Bush is interesting in that he is the first president to outright ignore e-mail from his constituents, which caused a minor scandal until American Idol hit the airwaves back in the early years of this decade. At any rate, this matter keeps popping up like a bad penny, most notably White House staff members using GOP e-mail servers to avoid the archival of their …
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is so hot to uncover dastardly plots of domestic terrorism in this country that, for at time at least, they were mining such fields of data as who bought what from middle eastern grocery stores to determine who might be a religious extremist and terrorist. Yep - they thought sales of falafel might help them generate the results that they're pressured to produce for the people on high. Thankfully, common sense prevailed (did they hire a four year old to check their logic or something?) and they spiked the plan in 2006. The article makes a …
It has come to the attention of the news media that documents that really shouldn't be getting out (like blueprints of high-security military installations) are being stashed on publically accessible web and FTP servers around the net, sometimes on the networks of the subcontractors themselves where anybody with the time and patience to go digging has a chance at finding it. During research for this article, reporters working for the Associated Press found dozens of sensitive documents that weren't even protected with a basic password. Moreover, sometimes you …
Ever since 9/11, the US government has been an informational vacuum cleaner that sucks up information on just about everyone in this country, or who happens to enter or leave the country (as some people with laptops have discovered). What they do with it and where they put it all is a matter of some speculation; suffice it to say that the network attached storage system companies are making a killing selling RAID systems to them... at any rate, it's come to light that they're mining more than just terrorism-related information to generate profiles on people. In fact, there …
Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as Surgeon General of the United States of America between 2002 and 2006 has gone public with some of the problems he had after his appointment by the Bush administration, and it looks like censorship, control, and politicking were the driving force behind a lot of policies and not medical research and science. Dr. Carmona went before a committee in the House of Representatives yesterday, and went on the record in stating that he was censored in many ways by the current regime, including the editing of his speeches by aides who were idealogically closer …
Last night at LAX, a man of Iraqi descent was taken aside to be searched in depth because he kept setting off the metal detectors. He kept setting off the hand-held metal detectors even though he'd emptied his pockets of everything even vaguely metallic, so they proceeded to the nightmare of most human beings - the body cavity search.
