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Senators: Hands Off Kids’ Data Two lawmakers introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate Wednesday to prohibit corporations from selling the personal information of children under the age of 16 without their parents’ consent. Source: Wired News, March 4, 2004 Grocery store goes to fingerprint payments The Piggly Wiggly grocery chain has announced it will begin offering a high-tech payment feature allowing customers in several stores to pay using their fingerprints. Source: WorldNetDaily, March 4, 2004 U.S. Pressing for High-Tech Spy Tools Despite an outcry over privacy implications, the government is pressing ahead with research to create powerful tools to mine millions of public and private records for information about terrorists. Source: Yahoo News, February 22, 2004 Security Efforts Turning Capital Into Armed Camp An antiaircraft missile, ready for use, sits atop a federal office building near the White House. Devices that test the air for chemical and biological substances are positioned throughout the city. Subway stations are now equipped with "bomb containment" trash bins. A major highway that runs by the Pentagon is being rerouted several hundred yards away. A security wall is going up around the Washington Monument. Day by day, the nation’s capital is becoming a fortress, turning a city known for graceful beauty into a virtual armed camp. In response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, federal security agents along with their counterparts in the Washington, Maryland and Virginia governments began a huge effort to build permanent safeguards for the capital area’s most important buildings and monuments. Source: NY Times, February 21, 2004 Links to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. — James Madison Feds seize family’s ranch Property owners fight government ‘land grab’ For nearly 100 years, federal agencies and ranchers worked together to improve the range and to develop a growing economic foundation for Western states. Things began to change with the rise of the environmental movement in the late 1970s. By the mid 1980s, there was a concerted, coordinated effort to rid the West of ranchers. In 1992, with the publication of the Wildlands Project, the reasons for squeezing out the ranchers, and other resource providers, began to come into focus. Source: WorldNetDaily, February 10, 2004 Keeping Secrets: The Bush administration is doing the public’s business out of the public eye. Abstract: The Bush administration has been promoting secrecy in the executive branch and withholding information from the public, claiming national security concerns. Source: U.S. News & World Report, December 22, 2003 Airline Gave Passenger Data to U.S. Government Northwest Airlines provided information on millions of passengers for a secret U.S. government air security project after the Sept. 11 attacks on America, the Washington Post reported on its Web Site on Saturday. The newspaper said Northwest gave three months of passenger data from October through December 2001 to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center. The Post said federal records showed more than 10 million passengers traveled with the airline during that period. Source: Reuters (online), January 17, 2003 Selling sex and corruption to your kids (Part 1) It’s hip-hop in suburbia, the culture of rap. Everywhere students wear baseball caps turned backwards or pulled down over their eyes, crotches that hang to mid-shin, and waists that sag to reveal the tops of brightly colored boxers. Expensive name-brand high-tops complete the outfit. Variations on the theme are hooded sweatshirts, with the hood worn during school, and "do rags," bandannas tied on the head, a style copied from street gangs. Just as ubiquitous are the free-flying swear words, sound bursts landing kamikaze-style, just out of reach of hall guards and teacher monitors. … Source: WorldNetDaily, January 15, 2004 Why today’s youth culture has gone insane (Part 2) Remember in the classic, biblical epic films of the 1950s, how Sodom and Gomorrah were portrayed? Drunken men with multiple piercings and bright red robes, with one loose woman under each arm, cavorting in orgiastic revelry against a background of annoying, mosquito-like music? Maybe a bone through the nose as well? Hollywood took pains to depict these lost souls in the most debauched and irredeemable manner – to justify their subsequent destruction with fire and brimstone as punishment for their great sinfulness. Guess what? Those Hollywood depictions don’t even begin to capture the shocking reality of what is going on right here in America’s culture today – I mean, they’re not even close. Source: WorldNetDaily, January 16, 2004 Air Travel Database Plan Is Set To Advance Despite stiff resistance from airlines and privacy advocates, the U.S. government plans to push ahead this year with a vast computerized system to probe the backgrounds of all passengers boarding flights in the United States. The government will compel airlines and airline reservations companies to hand over all passenger records for scrutiny by U.S. officials, after failing to win cooperation in the program’s testing phase. The order could be issued as soon as next month. Under the system, all travelers passing through a U.S. airport will be scored with a number and a color that ranks their perceived threat to the aircraft. Source: The Washington Post (paper), January 12, 2004 Quarantining dissent When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up "free speech zones" or "protest zones," where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and outside the view of media covering the event. Source: SFGate.com, January 4, 2004 Program to fingerprint U.S. visitors starts Visitors to the United States with visas will be greeted with a demand for fingerprints and photographs Monday as a government program intended to fight terrorism takes effect. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says the goal of the US VISIT program is to track the millions of people who come to the United States every year on business, student and tourist visas — and to use the information as a tool against terrorists. Source: CNN, January 4, 2004 Army Stops Many Soldiers From Quitting According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three 00soldiers [their descriptions omitted] should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas are currently serving in Iraq, and Eagle has just been deployed. On their Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is now listed sometime after 2030 — the payroll computer’s way of saying, "Who knows?" Washington Post (online), December 29, 2003 Critics decry misapplication of terror law’s money-laundering provisions It was widely reported as an outrage, a use of the USA PATRIOT Act by the puritanical Attorney General John Ashcroft and his Justice Department to go after a crime that had nothing to do with terrorism. FBI agents conceded using Title III, the section of the USA PATRIOT 000Act that covers money laundering, in Operation G-string – an investigation of corruption allegations against a strip-club owner in Las Vegas. The agents used Section 314 to seize the financial records of local elected officials the FBI thought might have taken money from the owner. That section allows the government to conduct wide-ranging searches of "financial institutions" in cases involving suspected "terrorist acts or money laundering." And the "or" apparently is the key word in this case. Source: WorldNetDaily, December 29, 2003 Let’s do some detective work I’d like to enlist the services of my fellow Americans with a bit of detective work. Let’s start off with hard evidence. The Federalist Papers were a set of documents written by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to persuade the 13 states to ratify the Constitution. In one of those papers, Federalist Paper 45, James Madison wrote: The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State. If we turned James Madison’s statement on its head, namely that the powers of the federal government are numerous and indefinite and those of the states are few and defined, we’d describe today’s America. Was Madison just plain ignorant about the powers delegated to Congress? Before making our judgment, let’s examine statements of other possibly misinformed Americans. Source: WorldNetDaily, December 10, 2003 Suit Seeks to Stop National Database Civil rights organizations and immigrant advocacy groups filed a lawsuit in Brooklyn federal court yesterday seeking to stop the federal government from including the names of immigration-law violators in a national database of criminals, charging that the practice is unlawful. The groups allege that the Justice and Homeland Security departments were not authorized by Congress to include visa violators in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Doing so only encourages state and local police to target immigrants, they say. Source: nynewsday.com, December 18, 2003 CDC vaccines study slammed as cover-up A pharmaceutical and government cover-up? It is a familiar enough accusation, and this time the fuse was lit by yet another study from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, this one titled Safety of Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines: A Two-Phased Study of Computerized Health Maintenance Organization Databases. The report concluded that "no consistent significant associations were found between TCVs [thimerosal-containing vaccines] and neurodevelopment outcomes." Source: WorldNetDaily, December 9, 2003 Cameras Trace Students’ Every Move When an Ohio school bus driver swerved off the road, no one had to wonder what went wrong. On-board cameras showed it all. Source: CBS News (online), November 20, 2003

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