The United States government formally apologized and will pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit brought by an Oregon attorney who was mistakenly accused of involvement in the 2004 Madrid, Spain, train bombings.
On Tuesday, school districts in Michigan, Vermont and Texas, together with the National Education Association asked a federal appeals court to revive an old lawsuit, arguing that schools should not have to comply with requirements which aren't funded by the federal government.
A survey of business travelers and tourists visiting the United States shows that foreign visitors worry more about customs officials at ports of entry than about terrorism.
The Department of Justice Inspector General will conduct an internal review of how the department handled information gained from President Bush's controversial terrorist surveillance program, but will not review whether the program is actually legal, officials said Monday.
With each passing day, airport security becomes even more surreal. It's becoming increasingly clear to even the infrequent traveler that Homeland Security has become just another government bureaucracy more interested in enforcing its rules without rhyme or reason than in keeping anyone safe. Here are a few bizarre things that happened over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Federal agents arrested private investigator Steven Rambam on July 22 on trumped-up charges, just before he was scheduled to give a talk on privacy at the HOPE Number Six conference in New York City, and attendees who had hoped to hear him speak about the intersection of commercial and government databases and the resulting loss of privacy left disappointed, confused and more than a bit fearful. But on November 16, he returned and gave a three-hour presentation to a standing room only audience at the Stevens Institute in Hoboken, N.J.
Nearly halfway to its goal of finding 20,000 liberty lovers to move to the state of New Hampshire to work for smaller government and greater personal liberty, the Free State Project is hosting the 2007 New Hampshire Liberty Forum to showcase the progress already made toward making the state even more free. Come to Concord February 23-25, 2007, and meet libertarian luminaries such as ABC News correspondent and author John Stossel, 2004 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik, and many more, including yours truly.
"We have a serious problem in this country," says security expert Bruce Schneier, who gets a hat tip for this week's TSA Follies. "The TSA operates above, and outside, the law. There's no due process, no judicial review, no appeal." Nor, it seems, is there any intelligence, or even plain old common sense. But if we're lucky, we can have a good laugh.
If you disagree with the policies of the U.S. government, or are a member of a group or association which expresses disagreement with government policies, an agent of the federal government is likely reading your web site and subscribed to your mailing list. Undercover officers of the Federal Protective Service subscribed to the mailing lists and monitored Web sites of peaceful anti-war groups, and contributed information about those groups' activities to a military intelligence database, according to Pentagon documents released Tuesday.
In a trial measure rolled out this week, British police gained the power to take the fingerprints of members of the public while out on patrol, cross-referencing the data against a national database containing 6.5 million fingerprints.
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