In his new book, Three Felonies a Day, attorney Harvey Silverglate holds that the typical American professional commits an average of three federal crimes a day, just going about their daily business, without even realizing it. And the only thing keeping them out of prison — make that keeping you out of prison — is the fact that federal prosecutors haven’t looked at you yet. “No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch,’ reads a statement on the book’s Web site, “and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.’

While Three Felonies a Day illustrates the problem quite well, today I want to talk about solutions. Likely you have never thought you needed to protect yourself from the government. But you probably weren’t aware that so many federal laws are “impossibly broad and vague’ that you were a “criminal’ several times over today, just for going to work, picking up your kids, and eating dinner. Moreover, the concept of criminal intent has been largely removed from the law, so you can be imprisoned even if you had no idea what you were doing was against the law.

Under the English common law we inherited, a crime requires intent. This protection is disappearing in the U.S. As Mr. Silverglate writes, “Since the New Deal era, Congress has delegated to various administrative agencies the task of writing the regulations,’ even as “Congress has demonstrated a growing dysfunction in crafting legislation that can in fact be understood.’ Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it. Expect more such prosecutions as Washington adds regulations. — Wall Street Journal

One of the most powerful solutions against the sorts of miscarriages of justice that land people like you in prison is privacy. Privacy makes it much harder for an overzealous prosecutor to spin your perfectly innocent activities into “crimes.’ Not to mention it also provides protection against the more mundane threats of identity thieves, psychotic ex-spouses, and so on.

A few people figured out long ago that the federal government wasn’t actually here to help, and one of them, “Boston T. Party,’ (a pen name) in 1996 wrote Bulletproof Privacy, now out of print. The thin volume, most of which is now quite dated, provided a how-to manual with practical solutions for increasing your personal privacy. Boston has since rewritten and expanded it, and the new book, One Nation, Under Surveillance, is three times the size, and has at least three times the practical solutions for protecting yourself.

(I met Boston at this year’s New Hampshire Liberty Forum where he spoke on gun rights in the U.S. after the D.C. v. Heller case. He graciously sent me a signed copy of One Nation, Under Surveillance for free. Unfortunately it got buried under a huge stack of papers on my desk for several months and I only recently found it again.)

Privacy is an insurance policy against oppression. Privacy allows a tyrannized citizenry to think independently, freely, and clearly. (Imagine if book stores were regulated as gun stores!) To speak out, network, and organize against unruly government — all of this in perfect accord with your natural rights, and in tradition with our American history and Constitution. We did not form the servile institution of government for the goal of limitless obedience to that servant. Neither did the States federate themselves under the Constitution for the utter dissolution of their own autonomy and prerogatives. . . .

A government which knows everything about its people is an unassailable government, for the people can no longer safely congregate nor precipitate. In an Orwellian state in which all your communications, transactions, and associations are monitored/approved, from whence comes any possible readjustment — much less a successful revolution from it? . . .

When privacy goes, the people have in a sense “thrown away the key’ to their shackles. Think of your decreasing privacy as being measured for a tailored straightjacket.

What do you have to hide? Today, perhaps nothing. Next year, maybe a lot depending on new information and revised priorities. Privacy is a comprehensive insurance policy. Keep up the premiums, even if you’re not quite sure why.

I’m not going to share much of the how-to with you. That’s in the book, which you should buy. Now. Or even months ago, and I’m sorry this thing sat under a bunch of junk on my desk for so long. I learned quite a few things I never knew, and refreshed myself on those I did. The thing about many of the privacy techniques shown in the book is that in order to protect your privacy most effectively, they have to be in place already before you are threatened.

That means you — no matter how innocent you think you are — need to protect yourself.

Virtually everything imaginable is covered, most in great detail. A few topics were not covered in detail, such as creating alternate identities, or trusts and financial instruments, since the information tends to go out of date rapidly, or would require their own books, or might be illegal to even talk about (in the supposed land of the free). So it is not a complete how-to, but it is nearly complete.

Most of the expanded content in this book deals with online privacy. This was hardly an issue in 1996 when Bulletproof Privacy was published and almost nobody had even heard of the Internet; today virtually everyone is online and too few people on the Internet do much of anything to protect their privacy. Consider the fugitive who fled to Mexico and then updated his status on Facebook. “People just don’t think through the privacy implications of putting their information on the Internet,’ security expert Bruce Schneier wrote Monday. “Facebook is how we interact with friends, and we think of it in the frame of interacting with friends. We don’t think that our employers might be looking — they’re not our friends! — that the information will be around forever, or that it might be abused. Privacy isn’t salient; chatting with friends is.’

The sections dealing with securing your computer and being private online are valuable content and the book is worth buying for this alone; Boston covered pretty much everything, from e-mail to cookies to malware to encryption to government raids. I did spot a few technical errors, but nothing that invalidated the techniques presented.

I do have a few minor nits to pick, though. The first is that I don’t feel enough attention was given to risk assessment. Any security expert will tell you that knowing what risks you face, how likely they are to occur, and how disruptive they would be if they occurred, is critical information in determining what you need to do to protect yourself. Boston assumes that his readers want as much privacy as possible, almost without regard to cost or inconvenience. I would have liked to see more treatment of specific risks and how particular techniques mitigate those risks, as well as how to assess risk generally. This, I think, would make the book more accessible and more useful to a wider audience.

Second, I will have to share one of Boston’s techniques. He recommends using Puppy Linux, a stripped down operating system distribution which can run from a CD or USB stick, instead of having your operating system installed on your hard drive. Puppy Linux can also encrypt your data and save it back to the same USB stick, which he recommends. This is probably workable for some people, and is practically necessary when using a public computer (since they can’t be trusted) but other people will be entirely unable to do this, myself included. His advice to never, ever use Windows for anything is sound, of course. But I do many things which pretty much require an installed operating system, such as video editing. For people who can’t live off a USB stick, I would recommend you install Ubuntu or Fedora, both of which are much more full-featured and also offer simple full-disk encryption for your hard drive which is stronger than that provided in Puppy Linux. (I helped test the full-disk encryption feature in Fedora and contributed a few small bits of code to it.)

Finally, with the rapid changes in technology, and the relentless encroachment of government into every aspect of people’s lives, doubtless much of the information in One Nation, Under Surveillance will be out of date, useless, or even potentially dangerous soon. I would like to see some sort of web site to serve as an online addendum to the book, which could contain errata, new information, perhaps a wiki, etc. Many books, especially dealing with technical topics, have such sites already and they serve to add further value.

One Nation, Under Surveillance should be on the bookshelf of anyone serious about privacy, both online and offline. If you aren’t sure, but you think you might need some privacy in the future, you should use it to get started now. By the time you’re sure you need privacy, it may be too late.

And if you’ll excuse me, I need to clean my desk.

The justices let stand without comment the January 2006 appeals court decision.

In 2002, John Gilmore attempted twice to board an airplane without showing government-issued identification and was denied boarding both times. Officials repeatedly refused to show him a law or regulation which required him to show ID, claiming it was sensitive security information, and he went to court.

Copies of the security directive in question have been leaked and have been available on the Internet for years. It does not require passengers to show identification, but does require that anyone who does not show identification go through secondary screening and requires special handling procedures for their checked baggage.

But Gilmore’s Supreme Court appeal wasn’t about being asked to show ID so much as being asked to follow a law without being able to know what the law says.

According to a statement by the Identity Project, which Gilmore heads and funds, “We must insist that our elected representatives control the TSA, and hold it accountable for its actions by, first, demanding that it make public this and any other laws it promulgates to bind the public.’ — 27B Stroke 6

Gilmore calls secret law “an abomination’ and says that it violates his right to due process. But now, with the refusal of the Supreme Court to hear this case, Americans can be subject to secret laws. Didn’t think that sort of thing could happen here? It can now.

Oh, and as the Ninth Circuit said in its decision, “the Constitution does not guarantee the right to travel by any particular form of transportation.’ You don’t have the right to travel either, according to these people.

The noose tightens.

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.

NBC News revealed in December 2005 that the Threat and Local Observation Notice database, used by the military to track potential terrorist threats to military installations, contained data on peaceful protesters and anti-war groups. The Pentagon subsequently announced that after a review, the data had been cleaned out of the database and intelligence personnel retrained.

“I don’t want it, we shouldn’t have had it, not interested in it,’ said Daniel J. Baur, the acting director of the counterintelligence field activity unit, which runs the Talon program at the Defense Department. “I don’t want to deal with it.’

Mr. Baur said that those operating the database had misinterpreted their mandate and that what was intended as an antiterrorist database became, in some respects, a catch-all for leads on possible disruptions and threats against military installations in the United States, including protests against the military presence in Iraq.

“I don’t think the policy was as clear as it could have been,’ he said. Once the problem was discovered, he said, “we fixed it,’ and more than 180 entries in the database related to war protests were deleted from the system last year. Out of 13,000 entries in the database, many of them uncorroborated leads on possible terrorist threats, several thousand others were also purged because he said they had “no continuing relevance.’ — New York Times

Each of the documents, (PDF) released Tuesday to the American Civil Liberties Union pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request, show that the leads on anti-war protests originated with undercover FPS agents, whose names were redacted from the documents at the request of FPS’s parent agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

One such document details an anti-war protest of a Sacramento, Calif., military entrance processing station planned by Veterans for Peace on Veterans Day in 2004, a day the center was closed. VFP specifically rejects any type of violent protest, according to its Web site. There were “no known vandalism or incidents as a result of the protest,’ the document notes.

Another document notes that VFP “is a peaceful organization, but there is potential future protest[s] could become violent,’ an accusation that VFP executive director Michael McPhearson calls “appalling.’

“The federal government should not be wasting valuable resources gathering files on peaceful protesters who disagree with the Bush administration’s policies,’ McPhearson said.

Another document details peaceful protests by the War Resisters League in New York City in 2005, noting that it “advocates Gandhian nonviolence,’ “will not use physical violence or verbal abuse toward any person’ and “will not damage any property.’

Several other documents detail peaceful protests at military recruiting stations by the American Friends Service Committee, National Front for Peace and Justice, and other groups.

Dave Ridley protests Nov. 13 in Concord, N.H.

FPS, originally created in 1971 as part of the General Services Administration to protect federal buildings, was moved under the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. It routinely monitors anyone it deems a potential threat to federal assets, such as Dave Ridley and the New Hampshire Underground.

An FPS officer cited Ridley for distributing handbills at an Internal Revenue Service office in Nashua, N.H., in September, after he wrote about the experience in the Keene Free Press, an alternative newspaper published in Keene, N.H. Ridley had entered the IRS office holding a sign saying “Is it right to work 4 IRS?’ and handed out flyers urging IRS agents to quit their “immoral’ jobs.

Last week he and 16 other people protested at the federal building in Concord just prior to his November 13 court appearance.

“The feds admitted in court that they read this website,’ said Kat Kanning, publisher of the Keene Free Press and owner of the New Hampshire Underground Web site. Members of the site advocate smaller government and individual liberty and regularly hold peaceful protests throughout the state.

So it is that John Gilmore is challenging apparently secret Transportation Security Agency regulations which he was told he could not see after being denied boarding two aircraft at two different California airports. Gilmore is taking his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court after losing on appeal in the Ninth Circuit.

The government has said that the public can’t know what the regulations are because they constitute Sensitive Security Information, or SSI, which is overly broad and covers almost anything the TSA does — even many of the things you can stand there and obviously watch them doing.

“The TSA is allowed to withhold some information from the public, but only in cases where transportation security is at risk,’ said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. “Simply showing Americans the rules they must follow can’t possibly compromise security. The real danger here is meaningless secrecy, which can hide security flaws, frustrate the justice system, create confusion, and undermine government accountability.’

The Constitution and laws like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) prohibit the government from imposing secret laws on the public. But if the lower court decision permitting the secrecy is allowed to stand, it opens the door to other government agencies creating undisclosed rules and regulations without oversight.

“‘Security’ shouldn’t be a magic password allowing the government to escape accountability,’ said Hofmann. “The Supreme Court should hear this case and review why the TSA insists on keeping this basic information secret.’ — Electronic Frontier Foundation

Since I’m in Boston right now, I’m going to forgo my usual summary of the background of the case and refer you to Ryan Singel’s excellent article at 27B Stroke 6.

The longer this goes on, the stranger it gets. Since Gilmore was denied boarding those fateful flights in 2002, many people have decided to attempt to fly without showing identification, and virtually all of them have succeeded in doing so.

Gilmore’s case, though, should clarify whether we are a secret police state where we have to follow laws that we aren’t allowed to read for ourselves, or whether some small vestiges of liberty still remain.

For a very few well-connected people, the REAL ID Act is a way to make lots of money.

The organization set to profit from the REAL ID Act is the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. According to its web site, AAMVA “is a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization striving to develop model programs in motor vehicle administration, police traffic services and highway safety. The association also serves as an information clearinghouse in these areas, and acts as the international spokesman for these interests.’

AAMVA is the most likely organization to run the massive new databases which will be required for the REAL ID Act. It represents all 50 U.S. states and 10 Canadian provinces.

And now, AAMVA has hired Brian Zimmer, a well-connected House staffer who is a major proponent of REAL ID.

Zimmer worked for the past five years as senior policy adviser and investigator for the House Judiciary Committee. There he helped investigate and conduct the committee’s oversight on issues such as fraud prevention, border security and counterterrorism, among others.

Before working with the Judiciary Committee, Zimmer from 1995 to 2001 served as the automated procurement manager in the Office of Procurement and Purchasing in the House.

At AAMVA, his responsibilities include working on identity management policy, managing the identity management staff and working with outside groups that deal with identify management, among other activities. He also will work to pursue federal grants for identity management projects. — Roll Call

AAMVA has been at this for a very long time, notes Jim Harper, director of information policy studies for the Cato Institute.

AAMVA is well recognized (by those who care to follow these issues) as a proponent of driver regulation, national IDs, and even internationally uniform ID systems. Since at least the late 1930′s AAMVA has been pushing regulatory control of drivers and driving. As I note in my book, Identity Crisis, “Before September 11, 2001, AAMVA promoted a national identification card as a solution to illegal immigration. After September 11, 2001, it promoted a national identification card as a solution to terrorism. If national identification cards are a hammer, AAMVA sees every public policy problem as a nail.’

AAMVA collects about $1 per driver per year (roughly $13 million) for its part in administering the Commercial Drivers License Information System. AAMVA would make much more as the administrator of databases required by the REAL ID Act. — Jim Harper, Cato Institute

Harper further notes that “Brian is a nice guy and, as I say, dedicated to his cause.’

The people who want to control and oppress you are almost always nice guys. But they’re always dedicated to their cause, that of complete domination of your life in every conceivable aspect. That’s why, nice as they may be, they must continue to be vigorously opposed.

But does it go far enough? When the government can’t get the information on you that it wants because of the Privacy Act, it can always turn to a commercial data broker. And they know more about virtually everyone than anyone else, including the government itself.

On November 2, the cable network CNBC aired a two-hour special called “Big Brother, Big Business’ which explored the issues of privacy and technology which can be used to track people.

I don’t want to ruin the ending, so I’ll just say that the Liberty Coalition put a copy of the special up on Google Video, and invite you to watch for yourself and make up your own mind. See what the commercial data brokers have to say for themselves.

I will say, though, that some undeserved anti-corporate bias sneaked through the presentation. The problem is not just that companies are compiling data on people; this is actually a valuable and useful service. For instance, it actually helps cut down on the amount of uninteresting junk mail you receive.

Though there is a down side to commercial data mining: The company collecting information from you can figure things out about you which seem entirely unrelated to the information you give them. You might be pregnant, for instance, but not yet ready to tell anyone about it.

The most serious problem as I see it is that it’s too easy for the data to fall into the wrong hands. And as we’ve seen before in our history, all too frequently the wrong hands are the hands of the government. Once again, the government, not the corporation, is the root of the problem.

Federal prosecutors don’t actually bring terrorism charges if they can find any lesser charges which will result in a deportation and preserve national security secrets, officials said.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the News 21 Program of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. According to a statement on its Web site, it aims to transform journalism in the 21st century by “preparing future media leaders to be analytic thinkers, clear writers and communicators, armed with an in-depth understanding of the context and complexity of issues facing the modern world.’ And it’s starting to unleash a new breed of journalists on the world.

Two of them turned in this story to the Washington Post, which the editor promptly buried in the back pages.

The Social Security Administration is “literally the Fort Knox of identity information in the United States,’ said James Huse, the agency’s inspector general from 1998 to 2004. “That’s a pretty impressive investigative tool that no other agency possesses.’

From just after Sept. 11 through 2005, Social Security officials sent prosecutors 456 referrals that were classified as terrorism-related, according to statistics compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The review shows that 91 percent of those referrals led to prosecutions. . . .

Still, few if any suspects in Social Security cases are ever linked publicly to alleged terrorist activity. Most cases referred to prosecutors in the months after Sept. 11 involved document fraud by Latino immigrants working at airports. . . .

“Prosecution of terrorism-related targets on [immigration and document fraud] charges is often an effective method — and sometimes the only available method — of deterring and disrupting potential terrorist planning and support activities without compromising national security information,’ Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty wrote in a Justice Department white paper in June. . . .

The Internal Revenue code normally prohibits Social Security from releasing information in the wage and earnings database, even to law enforcement agencies. But IRS and Social Security officials are permitted to waive that rule in “life-threatening situations.’ A 30-day waiver was granted immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks and was extended four times by the IRS through early 2002, [Jonathan] Lasher [deputy chief counsel to the Social Security Administration's inspector general] said. — Washington Post

That explains how stealing Corn Flakes became a federal terrorism investigation.

Of course, it didn’t help that post-9/11 Justice Department rules allowed for almost anything to be classified as a terrorism-related investigation, as well as fudging the numbers in other ways.

So now, federal agents can turn anything into a terrorism investigation through some bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, get Social Security records which would otherwise be off-limits, and use whatever they find against you. And don’t think you have nothing to hide because you’re innocent. A screwed up computer record, and they are all over the place, would be enough for a predawn paramilitary raid at your house and a one-way trip to the nearest federal prison.

Have a nice day, tovarishch.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation brought a lawsuit January 31 against AT&T alleging that the company unlawfully cooperated with the National Security Agency in implementing what President George W. Bush calls the terrorist surveillance program, a program to capture international telephone calls of suspected terrorists and their associates where one end of the call is in the United States.

The Department of Justice on Thursday asked for a stay in the case, as well as the other cases which had been consolidated with it, asking the district court to halt entirely while the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals considers the case.

“The government’s proposed stay would not be in the interests of justice in this very important case about ongoing illegal spying on millions of ordinary Americans,’ said EFF media relations coordinator Rebecca Jeschke. “Many elements of our suit can and should go forward while the 9th Circuit considers the state secrets issues.’

The Department of Justice asserted that litigating the case would reveal national security secrets, causing exceptionally grave damage to the national security, and moved to dismiss the case. In July, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker denied the government’s motion to dismiss, ruling that “because the very subject matter of this litigation has been so publicly aired . . . dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.’

The government appealed that decision, and the the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed Wednesday to hear the appeal. The appeals court did not give an indication as to when it might rule on the appeal.

“We are looking forward to defending Walker’s decision to deny the motions to dismiss before the appeals court,’ said EFF staff attorney Kurt Opsahl.

After the motion to dismiss was denied, 17 other lawsuits against various telephone companies were consolidated with the EFF’s case. Judge Walker will hold a case management conference Nov. 17 for these cases, Opsahl said.

In a separate case, a federal judge in Michigan ruled that the NSA terrorist surveillance program was unconstitutional. The government is being allowed to continue the program while it pursues an appeal.

While I’d like to comment individually at all of the sites which have picked up the story, that would unfortunately be far too time-consuming. Even linking to them all would take too long at this point. So please consider this your response.

First, a bit of background: At the 2006 OSS.net IOP conference, organized by former intelligence officer Robert David Steele, sources said that Google was in bed with U.S. intelligence agencies. Anthony Kimery at HSToday broke the story in January. HSToday, a site rarely used as a source for several reasons: it requires a subscription, it didn’t (but now does) have RSS feeds, and carefully targets itself to government agencies, otherwise staying under the radar. It was almost a month before I even knew the story existed.

Even so, it’s worth registering to read the extensive background information HSToday has put together on Google’s association with the U.S. intelligence community (IC). Google, it seems, has been involved with the Central Intelligence Agency almost since its beginning. Here’s a small sample:

In June 1999, the then up-start Google received a $25 million round of equity funding led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the latter of which the CIA’s In-Q-Tel had developed a close relationship with to advance “priority” technologies of value to the IC. A number of Sequoia-bankrolled start-ups have contracted with the Department of Defense, especially after 9/11 when Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme met with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the application of emerging technologies to warfighting and intelligence collection. — HSToday

This is not, as Jason Battelle wrote, “in the Tin-Foil Hat category.” John, we missed it because some sites which may contain important information restrict their content to subscribers. We’ve relied too much on freely available information, and forgotten to look for information which isn’t so freely available. I’m sure Robert Steele would appreciate the irony.

Another question has been raised as to whether Steele is a reliable source. Apparently this story got big when Steele appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s radio show last week and talked about Google’s involvement with the intelligence community. Steele comes from an intelligence background in Marine Corps intelligence and the CIA. He created OSS.net to draw attention to the fact that U.S. intelligence relies too much on a Cold War siege mentality while most of the intelligence it really needs can be found from open sources. As for his reliability, I was privileged to hear him speak at a conference earlier this year, and I was quite surprised at his breadth and depth of knowledge about intelligence. I had spot-checked a few facts he’d given there, and found them to be true.

More to the point, I have no reason to doubt the veracity of Steele’s claim, nor the anonymous sources originally cited by HSToday.

When I originally published the story here, it got very little notice, primarily because at the time Homeland Stupidity was quite obscure. It’s much, much larger now, ranking today at 219th among the millions of blogs Technorati has indexed. And I plan to crack the top 100 within the next few months. It’s also since gained several other writers and is now indexed in Google News, bringing much more exposure.

Google, for its part, refuses to comment on national security matters. This story, and Google’s refusal to comment, simply provide more ammunition for Google’s critics. One of them even provides an alternative, called Scroogle, which promises to sanitize your searches so that you can’t be tracked, run by Daniel Brandt, who has been criticizing Google for years regarding its privacy and data retention policies.

“People averse to the risk of exposing their online activities to government surveillance should take Google’s studious silence as confirmation,” writes Cato Institute director of information policy studies Jim Harper.

Good advice.

While people are going through my old archives, here’s a related one you’ll want to read. How to really stay anonymous online: Using Tor is not enough.

IT contractors and intelligence officials familiar with the arrangement confirmed to HSToday.us that Google had been providing assistance to the intelligence community, but would not say under what authority that assistance had been requested or provided.

The intelligence community appears to be interested in data mining Google’s vast store of information on each user who uses Google’s services. Google collects data on each user’s search queries, which web sites users visited after making a query, and through its Google Analytics service, can also track users on cooperating web sites. It’s not clear what level of access to or how much of this information has been made available to intelligence agencies.

The contractor, who spoke on a not-for-attribution basis, said that at least one US intelligence agency he declined to identify is working to “leverage Google’s [user] data monitoring” capability as part of an effort by the IC to glean from this data information of “national security intelligence interest” in the war on terror. . . .

One of the sources did say, however, that the CIA’s Office of Research and Development “has been giving them additional money and guidance and requirements.”

Last November, the CIA – through In-Q-Tel [CIA venture capital company] – issued notices to sell $2.2 million worth of Google stock.

Robert David Steele, intelligence veteran and CEO of OSS.Net, Inc. which sponsored last week’s event, told HSToday.us Tuesday evening that “Google is being actively hypocritical and deceptive in playing up its refusal to help the Department of Justice when all along it has been taking money and direction for elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the Office of Research and Development at the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel, and in all probability, both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command.”

Steele added, “I have no doubt that Google, in its arrogance, decided it could make a deal with the devil and not get caught.” — HSToday.us

If you are extremely concerned about the possibility that your private browsing information is going to wind up in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies, you can throw a spanner in the works by blocking cookies from the following domains: google.com, googlesyndication.com, google-analytics.com, and your country-specific Google domain (e.g. google.co.uk). If you actually use Google services, such as Google Mail, then this obviously will prevent you from using those services.

Even with cookies blocked, a limited amount of user tracking is possible, so unless you really are a terrorist, it probably isn’t worth the trouble. I still have all of my Google Cookies. Then again, I already know they’re watching me…