The census -- like so many government programs -- has grown far beyond what the framers of our Constitution intended. The invasive nature of the current census raises serious questions about how and why government will use the collected information. It also demonstrates how the federal bureaucracy consistently encourages citizens to think of themselves in terms of groups, rather than as individual Americans.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will announce Friday that it is dropping a controversial plan to track livestock.
An error in a national criminal record database cost Eschol Amelia Studnitz her job.
What have you got to hide? The answer may shock you: If you're like most Americans, you have far more than you realize that you need to be hiding, and not doing so may be putting you and your family in grave danger.
You haven't done anything wrong, so why should you worry about surveillance? It was Cardinal Richelieu who said, "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him." The United States doesn't hang innocent people any more, but it certainly does imprison them by the millions, and occasionally does kill them.
It's that time again, time for outgoing government bureaucrats to make room for fresh new faces and to say goodbye. Today, outgoing Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff said goodbye to the country in a video. Of course, the government can't seem to do anything right, and now we can add making simple videos to that list.
Would anyone fly again if they knew the government's security procedures weren't intended to make people safe, but only to make them feel safe?Would you?
Protesters gathered Wednesday afternoon at the opening of the RFID in Fashion conference in New York City to urge clothing manufacturers and retailers not to embed tracking chips into articles of clothing.
You check in at the airline ticket counter. But instead of a boarding pass, you get shackled with an electronic bracelet which tracks your every move, contains all your personal information, and can shock you senseless. This vision of the future of air security is being floated around the Department of Homeland Security's research and development office.
The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators received a no-bid contract worth millions of dollars to implement a "verification hub" connecting state and federal databases under the REAL ID program.
So far the federal government has done little to respond to the historic floods in eastern Iowa which are among the worst in recorded history. In order to maintain tyranny in the flooded areas, local governments have had to step up to meet the challenge.
The Department of Homeland Security has granted an extension to New Hampshire for compliance with the provisions of the federal REAL ID program.
New York State will begin issuing new versions of so-called secure driver licenses as well as a version specifically for undocumented immigrants, Gov. Eliot Spitzer said last weekend.
Here at Homeland Stupidity, no government cow is sacred. Waste, fraud, abuse, plain incompetence, and bad policy are all fair game. As a result, government officials in the higher pay grades tend to be displeased with what they read here. As a general rule, the higher the pay grade, the more displeased.Therefore, I was not at all surprised to hear that high-ranking officials in the U.S. Marshals Service were upset with Sunday's published story regarding their Office of Protective Intelligence. I was, however, surprised to spot two surveillance teams while going about my business Tuesday night.
A Justice Department audit of the government's master list of known and suspected terrorists found errors and inconsistencies which would have allowed terrorists to enter the country undetected and would mistakenly identify innocent Americans as terrorists.
The state of Arizona will join Vermont and Washington state in creating a secure state identification document which can be used for travel within Canada and Mexico and will also likely meet the requirements of the REAL ID Act.
Over the past decade, cities around the country have established clergy response teams, comprised of pastors, priests and other religious leaders from all religious denominations, to provide aid, counseling and assistance to victims of crime and lately of natural disasters. Now a report suggests that these clergy response teams may be used to help put down civil unrest and enforce martial law.
The state of Vermont has partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to develop a new driver license document which will be accepted in lieu of a passport for border crossings, the department announced Tuesday.
Last weekend the Bush administration pushed through Congress a law to bolster the government's ability to intercept the electronic communications of foreigners and other "persons reasonably believed to be outside the U.S." without a court order.
Renowned security expert Bruce Schneier conducted an extensive interview with Transportation Security Administration head Kip Hawley, and asked him, in essence, when is airport security going to start making sense?
In late 2001, President Bush signed an executive order authorizing a controversial National Security Agency program, and on Tuesday, director of national intelligence Mike McConnell revealed that the executive order authorized not only the "terrorist surveillance program" whose existence was revealed in 2005, but a series of other programs as well.
How has government violated your rights to life, liberty and property? Tell us your story.
As you are probably aware, the greatest threat to your privacy and well-being stems from the government, whether directly or indirectly. Even the "freest" or "most democratic" governments have committed their share of atrocities, and even if you think you're safe today, if the political winds blow in a different direction tomorrow, you could be the next victim.Today, governments use databases to track virtually everything, including their own people. So an important part of protecting yourself is to minimize the amount of information governments have about you.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reported to have launched a criminal investigation into FBI employees' alleged misuse of national security letters to obtain information on Americans.
Updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity.
The more than 40 local and regional intelligence fusion centers created after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to improve information sharing between the federal government and state, local and tribal law enforcement, are failing to accomplish their mission of protecting the homeland.
On April 27, 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate intelligence committee that Congress should renew the USA PATRIOT Act, saying that there had "not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse."But six days earlier, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent Gonzales a report which said otherwise.
Updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity include spying, spying and more spying.
This day the rain moved in early in the afternoon, and continued well into the night, and yet people still set off their fireworks here in a city where it's, as far as I know, perfectly legal to do so. But while the star-spangled banner yet waves, the freedom it represents is a distant memory.
A new audit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of national security letters to gain access to information about domestic phone calls, e-mails and personal financial information revealed over 1,000 cases where agents may have violated the law or regulations governing the use of the letters.
When it comes to freedom on the Internet, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is at the forefront of the battle. Whether it's the national ID card, digital rights management, online privacy or domestic spying, EFF is doing the hard work of defending against those who would abuse the power of government against the people.That's why I give them money.
Do you know who's sleeping with whom in Washington? Is it you? If you can prove it, you just might make a cool million bucks.Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt on Sunday offered up to $1 million for "documented evidence of illicit sexual or intimate relations with a Congressperson, Senator or other prominent officeholder."
A passport card set to be issued by the State Department for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean doesn't require privacy protection, even though it uses a radio frequency identification chip which can be read from 20 feet away, because the chip itself doesn't contain personal information, according to the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
On Friday, May 4, an F5 tornado wiped the town of Greensburg, Kan., almost entirely off the map. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, along with the National Guard and local police from all over Kansas, then systematically kept out relief workers while they went house to house disarming the residents.
Two proposals being floated around Capitol Hill call for the Social Security card to be updated with biometric information and for U.S. employers to be required to verify it with the Department of Homeland Security when hiring.
The Department of Homeland Security will move forward with plans to implement the REAL ID Act despite widespread opposition from citizens and state legislatures.
An officious bureaucrat with the U.S. Army has tried to intimidate the Federation of American Scientists into removing from its Web site a copy of the Army's recently updated regulation on operational security. And FAS government secrecy project director Steven Aftergood told the bureaucrat in no uncertain terms to get lost.
A hard drive containing the names, Social Security and bank account numbers for 100,000 current and former Transportation Security Administration employees was reported stolen this week, prompting a criminal investigation.
Noah Shachtman reported Wednesday at Wired News that new Army regulations would severely restrict soldiers' ability to maintain web logs and send personal email, requiring them to clear every single post with a commanding officer. The Army says that's just not true and that nothing has changed for soldiers on the ground.
The majority of Americans, it seems, support the idea of a national ID, as long as it doesn't contain biometric information, according to a recent UPI/Zogby poll. But a large coalition of groups from every part of the political spectrum has gotten together to oppose the REAL ID Act as a threat to Americans' security.
Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff broke off talks with Canada on Wednesday over a plan to move the U.S. border inspection facility at the Peace Bridge from its current location in Buffalo, N.Y., to the Canadian side of the border.The dispute, it turns out, was over when the U.S. could take fingerprints of Canadians who aren't even crossing into the U.S.
The saga of Astroglide customer information being leaked onto the Internet appears to be coming to a close. The company has finally managed to remove all of the data from its Web site, as well as from Google's cache, and someone finally managed to reach a company spokesperson to get a statement.
Astroglide, which was notified last week of a data breach compromising more than 260,000 records of people who ordered free samples of its products, has taken down its page for ordering the free samples and removed the last of the records from its Web site.
Democrats in Congress are desperate to do something about the so-called tax gap, but they know that if they raise taxes, they'll be out on their asses in 2008. So they're going to try to squeeze ordinary Americans a little differently.
If you've ever tried Astroglide, you know it's some of the slipperiest stuff ever made. I could tell you stories, but that sort of story isn't appropriate on a site where children might be reading. Instead, I'll tell you another story, a story about people who use Astroglide.Astroglide suffered a data breach this week. People who ordered free samples of the company's products from their Web site from 2003 to the present may have had their names and email and shipping addresses published on the Internet.
Trust the government with your identity and you just might lose it. Even if the identity thief is already in prison.
"Terrorists win when the fear of them induces us to destroy the rights that make us free." Those were the words of one victim of post-9/11 anti-terrorism hysteria to a Congressional committee on Wednesday. So we got national security letters, a terrorist surveillance program, and probably many other programs, but instead of stopping terrorists, these programs have targeted ordinary Americans.
I'm in the market for a new portable media player, since my current one is getting rather old, not to mention full. Naturally, I looked at the current crop of iPods. They're excellent hardware and work well. But I won't buy one, not because of the iPod itself, but because of Apple's no-privacy policy.
The REAL ID Act will be a real nightmare for many reasons, only one of which is the fact that government bureaucrats will finally get most of the errors out of their massive databases on virtually every American.
Washington state Gov. Chris Gregoire is expected to sign a bill passed last week which would ostensibly prevent the state from participating in the REAL ID program, at least until the government ponies up some money to pay for it.
The biggest threat to your personal identity, as you should know by now, is the government. It has the largest databases, the most information about you, and the most corrupt people. So it's no surprise that government data about you is a prime target for identity thieves. Here are a few more examples.
The American Civil Liberties Union has joined the National Rifle Association to help protect the rights of Texans to travel with their guns, a move that has almost everybody scratching their heads.
The United States Census Bureau turned over names and addresses of American citizens of Japanese descent to the Secret Service during World War II. How dare those supposedly patriotic Americans not turn themselves in to their designated concentration camps!
In case you haven't noticed, there haven't been any posts here in several days. This is primarily because I've been wrapped up with another project which has taken up virtually all of my time since the last post. To make it up to you, I'm just going to give you links to several interesting items in my unread list for you to enjoy.
Governments can't always find new and creative ways to lose your personal information, try as they might. So when they can't, they resort to the tried and true. Here are three incidents where government displayed at least some creativity while putting you at risk.
The federal government expects you to do your part to help catch terrorists, by screening everyone you do business with against a public blacklist of suspected terrorists and drug traffickers maintained by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. Worse, people are actually starting to do this, and the national credit reporting agencies are now putting the government's black marks on the wrong people's credit reports.
Being forced by the government to spy on your own neighbors, customers, friends and family. It's coming. And it will be brought to you by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose national security letters have recently attracted national attention due to findings of abuse and lawbreaking by FBI agents.
REAL ID, that bitter pill which will further centralize identification of virtually every American, not to mention cost you untold billions of dollars, is so tough to swallow that many states are balking at it. But one state is eagerly accepting REAL ID after the Department of Homeland Security held out a carrot along with its sharp stick.
Maryland state police conducted what they call a "homeland security" operation Wednesday near the MARC commuter rail station in Brunswick. So, if it's about homeland security, why did the police have drug dogs sniffing cars?
The master list the federal government keeps of known and suspected terrorists, from which other government agencies derive their own watch lists, already hundreds of thousands of names large, is growing out of control, filling with "fragmentary," "inconsistent" and "sometimes just flat-out wrong" information, a top counterterrorism official said.
A hacker who broke into an Indiana government web site and compromised the identities of 71,000 health care workers and 5,600 people who purchased government services online has also targeted other state government web sites.Because, of course, that's where the money is.
The forthcoming REAL ID Act isn't a privacy nightmare, says a Department of Homeland Security official. In fact, it will improve your privacy and protect the security of your personal information.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the airport, the Transportation Security Administration announced Tuesday that it would begin random screening of airport employees and passengers within airport secure areas nationwide.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation repeatedly broke the law in order to obtain personal information about tens of thousands of Americans, much of which was never related to any sort of investigation, according to an inspector general's report released Friday.
Why is it that we keep giving information to government agencies, when we know that nothing good can come of it? Several examples from the last week show just how good government is at protecting personal information you provided to them.
"Soccer teams, family reunions and Civil War re-enactors" are in danger of being misidentified as terrorists from a data-mining program the Department of Homeland Security is testing which may have already violated privacy laws.
The government can access hard drives which are supposedly protected with common drive locking features offered by many major computer manufacturers. This is not news to many of my readers, but it certainly was news to Michael Alan Crooker.
The Department of Homeland Security has issued proposed regulations which will dictate what states must put on their driver licenses and identification cards to comply with the REAL ID Act of 2005 and implement the national ID scheme which Americans have said time and again that they do not want.The silver lining on this dark cloud is that most of the worst possible rules, such as RFID or fingerprinting requirements, didn't make it into the proposed regulations.
The so-called taxpayer advocate of the Internal Revenue Service, who is supposed to tell the government what concerns taxpayers, has called instead for the IRS to require online auction sites such as eBay to report sellers' activities.
When it comes to your personal information, threats are everywhere. But the biggest threat to your personal information might just be from your local government employees.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) drew a crowd of 150 supporters to Pembroke, N.H., late Saturday night to support his potential bid for the Republican Presidential nomination.The fundraising reception, organized by a supporter and held at a private home, raised over $14,000 for Paul's campaign.
The Department of Homeland Security isn't sufficiently protecting personally identifiable information on its computer systems, though it is making progress, according to an inspector general's report.
People don't trust the federal government to protect their privacy, according to a recent survey. As if anyone is actually surprised.
Your most private personal information is not truly safe anywhere except in your own head. Several examples this week show that it's certainly not safe with the government.
The Transportation Security Administration wants to hire 1,300 people, and divert 700 more from actual airport screening duties, to look for fake IDs.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has lost or had stolen 160 laptops in four years, including 10 with sensitive or classified information, and one containing personal information on FBI employees, according to a report released Monday by the Department of Justice inspector general. In addition, 160 weapons were lost or stolen from the FBI in that same time period, and FBI employees didn't always follow proper procedures in reporting the losses.
"We're being warned on television about people going through your identity documents and so forth," Bevan Bullock, a British pensioner, told the BBC. "The government are now giving them out willy-nilly."
We learned over the last week that hackers and thieves have made off with thousands of individuals' most sensitive personal information from government and government-related sources.
The Conservative party in Britain will scrap Tony Blair's planned compulsory ID card scheme if it wins the next election, according to a statement by Shadow Home Secretary David Davis.
You no longer have to be convicted of a federal crime in order for the U.S. government to take your DNA. Under the provisions of a little-known law passed a year ago, the Department of Justice will take DNA from anyone who is even arrested on federal charges.
You still think your personal information is safe in the hands of the government? Think again. Every time they come up with a way to keep your information secure, they also come up with a more creative -- or more stupid -- way to lose it. And now, the government can lose your personal information even if you never gave it to them.
There are actually a few things the government is good at. Misusing, abusing and especially losing your personal information rank high on the list. Sometimes they don't even bother losing it; they just put it up on the Internet for anyone to download. Here are a few incidents from last week in which government lost, had stolen and gave away your personal information.
In yet another blow to the Chinese people's online liberty, the PRC's Paramount Leader Hu Jintao has vowed to "purify" the Internet.
California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber plans to give California parents a lesson in parenting -- whether they like it or not.Next week, she will introduce a bill that will outlaw the spanking of children under four by their parents, a move that has sparked a flurry of both criticism and support in California and beyond.
The Department of Homeland Security can't make more than the slightest dent in the illegal immigration "problem," so officials have decided to focus their efforts on what they call the "worst of the worst," those who had been deported previously or committed crimes while in the U.S.
If you live or work in Kansas City, Mo., your most sensitive personal information has gone missing: your tax records.
The Transportation Security Administration is making changes to its procedures, retraining its employees, and hiring terrorist sympathizers.
A military intelligence database contained 186 reports of "anti-military protests or demonstrations in the U.S.," according to a Pentagon memo released by the American Civil Liberties Union Wednesday. At the same time, the ACLU released a report which shows that while it obtained copies of the intelligence reports, it utterly failed to read them.Little of this is news. The only thing really newsworthy here is how much the ACLU likes to make noise without actually doing anything constructive.
The Bush administration will stop conducting warrantless surveillance on Americans with suspected ties to terrorism, and will give the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court jurisdiction over the so-called terrorist surveillance program run by the National Security Agency since shortly after 9/11 and first disclosed in December 2005.
The Department of Defense will remove some personal information about high school students from a military recruiting database and shorten the amount of time it keeps the information, a civil liberties group announced last week.
The REAL ID Act of 2005 requires states to issue identification cards and driver licenses which conform to federal standards yet to be issued, and all of the information to be stored in a central database yet to be established. A privacy activist has said that he obtained internal Homeland Security documents which describe how that database will be established and run.
On Monday the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a Ninth Circuit appeals court decision which found that Americans do not have a "right to travel by any particular form of transportation" and do not have the right to know the laws and regulations they must obey.
Beginning this summer, European travellers to the U.S. will face even more affronts to their civil liberties when new regulations designed to combat terrorism come into effect. "This must be the Keystone Cops school of border control."
Taking a trip on an airplane used to be a tantalizing undertaking for millions of Americans. The thought of crossing thousands of miles in a few short hours continues to amaze and inspire us. Yet for thousands of people, the trip is fraught with trouble, beginning at airport check-in, where their travel plans are thwarted by hearing the words, "You're on a government watchlist."Now the Department of Homeland Security has created a new bureaucracy to try to streamline the process of tripping up Americans' travel.
In June, the Future of Freedom Foundation will host Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties, a four-day conference examining the intersection of these two burning issues, with an eye to restoring the limited-government principles on which the U.S. was founded.There's just one small problem.
The Transportation Security Administration is requiring port and maritime workers and truckers to purchase a $159 identity document and undergo a "threat assessment" to provide secured access to seaports, airports and other such facilities, but doesn't yet have the technology to read the cards.
Last month President Bush, in one of his infamous signing statements, claimed the authority to open Americans' mail without a warrant to collect foreign intelligence or in "exigent circumstances."
As you probably aren't aware, your cell phone can be used to locate you whenever the phone is turned on, even if you aren't on a call, and even if you think you have the GPS function disabled. The government has long taken advantage of this ability, tracking people even without probable cause.To make it more palatable, several wireless carriers are now offering this functionality as a service to parents to track their children.
Are you more afraid of airport security procedures than of terrorism? Do you think the Department of Homeland Security is out of their minds? If so, you aren't alone. Here are three reports from recent air travelers of the lunacy they encountered at the airport security checkpoint.
The U.S. Department of Justice is building a set of databases and database interconnections which will allow state and law enforcement agencies to search not only federal law enforcement agencies' case files, but also other state and local agencies' data.It's rare that I get to say a major news outlet screwed up a news story, so I'll say it now. A major news outlet omitted several key details on the nature and extent of "OneDOJ," the department's new information sharing initative.
Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
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