eBay offers items labeled as Mussolini’s blood, brain

Items that were purportedly the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s blood and parts of his brain were briefly offered for online sale on the Ebay auction site for 22,000 US dollars.
The neo-fascist granddaughter of Il Duce, Alessandra Mussolini, said the remains were stolen from Milan’s Policlinico hospital and she immediately [...]

“NET problem”

Russia’s intelligence services got connected to the secret information bases of the Interpol.
Our police have a considerable amount of experience collaborating with their foreign colleagues. Now, it will be expanded by means of electronic communication
Yesterday, the European Union officially gave Russia online access to the special databases of [...]

DHS Announces “Global Entry” Biometric Identification System for U.S. Airports

Today, the Department of Homeland Security proposed to make permanent Global Entry, a program the agency says will “streamline the international arrivals and admission process at airports for trusted travelers through biometric identification.” Under the proposed system, pre-registered international travelers can bypass conventional security lines by scanning [...]

‘Counterinsurgency’ to Fight U.S. Crime? No, Thanks

After the sickening murder of a 9-year-old boy in Washington, our friend Spencer Ackerman made an impassioned plea: U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus for D.C. metro police chief. The idea of America’s leading counterinsurgent taking on one of its most crime-ridden towns definitely has a certain [...]

The War on Drugs: FAIL: An Interview With Clifford Thornton Jr.

Climate Scientists’ E-Mail Hacked

This archive presents over 120Mb of emails, documents, computer code and models from the Climatic Research Unit at the , written between 1996 and 2009.
The CRU has told the BBC that the files were obtained by a computer hacker 3-4 days ago.
This archive includes unreleased global temperature analysis [...]

Government taking newborn DNA samples without permission

Google Provides Free Access to Full Text of Court Opinions

Google is taking a swing at the Lexis/Nexis / Westlaw duopoly by offering free searches and free access to the full text of state, district, and appellate court opinions. Law journals, too.
Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, [...]

Free Legal Help to Online Journalists

The Citizen Media Law Project announced the launch of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University’s Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics with online journalists who need legal help. OMLN will provide [...]

CCR Files Opening Brief in First Supreme Court Case to Challenge Patriot Act

Obama Administration Defending Law that Makes Speech Advocating Human Rights a Terrorist Crime
November 17, 2009, New York – Yesterday, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed the first brief in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the first case to challenge a portion of the Patriot Act before the [...]

Town to photograph every car that enters and leaves

Tiburon, California, is a twee little place. If you aren’t familiar with the old-country colloquialism “twee,” it means, well, something like “precious.” Like one of those dogs Paris Hilton used to carry in her purse.
When one wanders through its little streets, just north of San Francisco, one gets the sense [...]

iePolitics: More on Arrowhead Regional Medical Center

After being off work and without a paycheck for the past four weeks thanks to our FORMER County Administrative Officer Mark Uffer, writing that last article was a bit cathartic.  Mark was a bit upset with me for several reasons, one of which is that I finally got sick of [...]

Privacy concerns as NSA admits “helping” Microsoft

Security experts raised privacy concerns after a US National Security Agency official revealed that the Agency collaborated with Microsoft during the development stage of Windows 7. The revelation was made in a prepared statement by NSA information assurance director Richard Schaeffer, before the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism [...]

FBI kept tabs on Pulitzer-winning author Studs Terkel for 45 years

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which acted as America’s political police during the Cold War, spent several decades watching Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel, who died earlier this year at age 96.  The revelation was made by the City University of New York’s NYCity News Service, which [...]

Why We Must Not Always Be Compliant

You may recall this incident in which Steven Bierfeldt, a Ron Paul supporter, was detained by TSA screeners for no other reason than that he was carrying a box of cash:

But it was a good thing he chose to disobey the Transportation Security Administration agent’s unlawful [...]

Germany opposes bank data deal with US

Germany has announced its opposition to a European Union agreement to share bank data with the United States for anti-terrorist investigations.
According to the draft, financial records stored by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) financial data system including “name, account number, address, national identification [...]

Analysts: US capitalism on verge of collapse

The declining state of the US economy has convinced a growing number of American analysts that the US capitalist financial system is doomed to disintegrate.
Citing the works of other leading economists such as Jack Bogle and Marc Faber, Market Watch commentator Paul B. Farrell gives 20 reasons, in [...]

Global survey on free market capitalism: Majority say fix it or ditch it

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism (laissez-faire).
In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well. Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist [...]

Increasing number of corporations toppled by industrial espionage

Industrial espionage is no longer the part-time job of secret agents from spy movies. It is prospering in everyday life and growing at a phenomenal rate.
Billions of dollars and thousands of jobs are being lost due to the theft of trade secrets.
In recent years the definition of industrial espionage has [...]

Earth to Lou: It Could Have Been Different

It didn’t have to end this way for Lou Dobbs. He could have been a contender.
But Dobbs, a supremely self-confident man who often mentions his Harvard University education in private conversation, just wouldn’t listen. Time after time, as the “Lou Dobbs Tonight” show he has hosted on CNN (Cable [...]

From cop to politician

San Bernardino County Sheriff Rod Hoops has spent a career in law enforcement, but now he’s running for elective office and it’s a new ball game for him.
“I don’t really like that part of the job,” he told the San Bernardino County Democratic Club on Friday, Nov. 13. Even though [...]

Preschool Hype: National Security Edition

Retired officers push early childhood benefits to help national security
A bipartisan group of retired military officers says without more educational and health investments in children the country will face a growing “national security threat.”
Now, the group is pushing for significant investments in early childhood education, parenting guidance as well as [...]

Recruiting new informants

Here’s a revealing article in the Buffalo News: Walking thin line in Village of Attica: Would-be informant says police coerced her into cooperation. It’s about Bianca Hervey, a 20-year-old college student who got pulled over by police for failing to pay her traffic tickets. The police threatened to put her [...]

CALIFORNIA SEARCH & SEIZURE LAW: THE FOURTH AMENDMENT AND PRIVATE POSTAL BOXES

The defendant rented a private postal box. The police went to it and asked an employee if the defendant received mail at that facility. The clerk responded by reaching into the defendant’s postal box, retrieving three letters, and displaying them without opening them to the police. One showed a bill from [...]

Flaw in Fed Wiretaps Could Allow Circumvention

People who think they are being wiretapped by the cops could disable the taps by sending a stream of text messages or making numerous VOIP calls to overwhelm the system’s thin bandwidth, researchers in Pennsylvania postulate.
The researchers say they’ve found a vulnerability in U.S. law enforcement wiretaps, if only theoretical, that [...]

Secret Copyright Treaty Threatens Internet Freedom

Tennessee trooper suspended over ‘white pride’ e-mail

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A Tennessee state trooper who accidentally sent an e-mail proclaiming white pride to 787 state employees has been suspended for 15 days without pay and will have to attend diversity training.
The e-mail from Trooper Brent Gobbell states, in part, “You rob us, carjack us, and shoot at [...]

Justice Department issued secret subpoena for news site’s traffic

The Department of Justice earlier this year served and shortly thereafter withdrew a grand jury subpoena that sought information about all visitors to the journalism website Indymedia.us for one day, and also contained a gag order “not to disclose the existence of [the] request,” CBSNews.com reports.
In the [...]

EndGame full length version

Cryptome posts Microsoft’s COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) and COFEE User Guide – receives take-down demand

Cryptome posts Microsoft’s COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) and COFEE User Guide – receives take-down demand.
Click image

County Immigration Enforcement Plan Prompts Profiling Concern

Over the objections of eleven county residents, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors this week renewed a commitment to have the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department cooperate with federal authorities in identifying illegal immigrants and targeting them for deportation.
While a representative of the county sheriff’s department indicated [...]

ACLU Sues FBI for Imprisonment of New Jersey Man in Africa

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit [1] against the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying it illegally detained and mistreated an American, Amir Meshal, who was held in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia for four months in 2007 before being released.
According to the ACLU’s complaint, which was filed [...]

Mexico : Drug Decrim and the 10,000-Ton Monkey

Pot smoker in Mexico City. Mexicans consume an estimated 342 tons of marijuana a year. Photo by Castillo / AP.
Legalization is the only answer…
Mexico’s massive drug problem
As poet Juan Pablo Garcia posited long ago in his 1985 Pacheco (marijuana user) Manifesto: ‘drugs don’t make us criminals but laws against [...]

The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA

Through interviews with former narcotics agents, politicians, and bureaucrats, this exposé documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) up until the present day. Written in [...]

Big Brother to take a seat on MARTA buses

Wave to the camera. The Mountain Area Regional Transit Authority will soon have a new set of eyes to protect the safety of drivers and passengers.
MARTA provides public transportation service around Big Bear Valley and to Running Springs, Crestline, Lake Arrowhead and San Bernardino. The agency is in the process [...]

***** Attemp to Stage Anti-Immigrant Hate Event This Saturday in Big Bear Lake, Home of Big Bear Mountain & Snow Summit *****

Anti-amnesty rally being promoted for November 14 (Saturday) in Big Bear Lake. Come and show your support for our immigrant families, friends co-workers and neighbors.  This is your “four seasons resort,” as well as our home.
Though the organizers are not identified, they are requesting that anti-amnesty activists meet at the [...]

ACLU: Justice Denied: Voices from Guantanamo

Legalizing Undocumented Immigrants

Economic Progress Via Legalization: Lessons from the Last Legalization Program
Would legalizing currently undocumented immigrants in the United States place an unneeded amount of strain on the economy?
Not according to a recent report issued by the Immigration Policy Center. This report, titled “Economic Progress Via Legalization: Lessons from the Last Legalization [...]

Independent Report: ICE Enforcement Violates Workers’ Rights

Iced Out: How Immigration Enforcement Has Interfered with Workers’ Rights
The AFL-CIO, American Rights at Work, and the National Employment Law Project have jointly published this document which continues the criticism of ICE workplace immigration raids in the United States.
“This report shows that in too many instances, Immigration and [...]

Virginia drops plan for anonymous juries

The Supreme Court of Virginia has withdrawn a controversial proposal that would have automatically withheld the identities of jurors in all criminal cases, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
Several open government organizations, including the Virginia Press Association and the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, opposed the rule. The Reporters Committee [...]

More Maricopa County…

Source
This amazing video below was taken on October 19 in Arizona’s Maricopa County Superior Court.
As defense attorney Joanne Cuccia discusses her client’s sentencing hearing with the judge, Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office detention officer Adam Stoddard walks up behind her, and begins sifting through one of her files, which [...]

Here’s That Leaked Copyright Treaty Document

The secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement document we wrote about on Wednesday appeared on Wikileaks today, and our source has cleared us to publish it here as well.
We wrote that the document, (.pdf) if true, amounted to policy laundering at its finest -– that the United States was pushing the [...]

iePolitics: San Bernardino County to major U.S. Corporation (Google): Go away!

The news of this unbelievable episode was presented to me a couple weeks ago and I wasn’t able to gather more details until this weekend.
It looks like a major U.S. corporation recently embarked on a mission to San Bernardino County.
That mission? Establish a campus in the Victor Valley region of the [...]

US Humanism Campaign Sparks Debate

***Great!*** – Prohibition in England

Implementing Checkpoint Screening Technology

Aviation Security: DHS and TSA Have Researched, Developed, and Begun Deploying Passenger Checkpoint Screening Technologies, but Continue to Face Challenges
A recent report issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) indicates that the Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration are having difficulties implementing a plan to deploy [...]

FBI Demands Tattoo Shops Rat On Customers

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in league with the Bureau of Justice Assistance (part of the Department of Justice), has launched a program that harks back to East Germany’s Stasi.
In Philadelphia, the FBI has instructed tattoo shops to rat out their customers if they demand privacy, insist on paying [...]

University of Akron to employees: Hand over your DNA!

In a new expansion of the total surveillance state, the University of Akron is now reserving the right to demand DNA samples from all new employees, CBS News reports:
But the University of Akron has taken this to a surprising new level.
The Ohio school now reserves the right to require any [...]

‘Shake-and-Bake’ Meth Harder to Detect

These days, you don’t need a stove for shake-and-bake.
Or to cook methamphetamine.
The drug itself hasn’t changed, but the process of making it has, according to Chief Deputy Jack Campbell of the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office.  Meth stoves, or “labs” — often converted coolers — are being traded for plastic bottles with [...]

Q&A With FBI Director Mueller

As a result of polygraph testing, more than a thousand applications for employment at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been rejected or otherwise terminated in the last year alone, the FBI told Congress last month.  Polygraph testing has been the single largest reason for discontinuing an application, well ahead [...]