Archive for the 'Dictatorship' Category
Corrections Corporation of America Wants to Buy State Owned Prisons and Then Get States to Commit to Keeping Them Full of Prisoners
February 23rd, 2012Via: ACLU: Recently we learned that the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country, sent a letter to 48 state governors offering to buy up their state-owned and operated prisons and put them under CCA control. If offering cash-strapped states a quick infusion of money by taking control of […]
Fed Writes Sweeping Rules From Behind Closed Doors
February 23rd, 2012Via: Wall Street Journal: The Federal Reserve has operated almost entirely behind closed doors as it rewrites the rule book governing the U.S. financial system, a stark contrast with its push for transparency in its interest-rate policies and emergency-lending programs. While many Americans may not realize it, the Fed has taken on a much larger […]
Denver Family Stranded After Passport Denied Because of Crease
February 22nd, 2012Via: KDVR: A Denver family was supposed to be in Belize this week enjoying a beach getaway with their loved ones. Instead, they’re in a hotel room in Dallas, TX because an American Airlines official there claimed they had a mutilated passport. “We started at Denver International Airport, where we checked in and all our […]
The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom
February 22nd, 2012Via: Wall Street Journal: On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last […]
U.S. Super-Sizing Afghan Jail It Promised to Abandon
February 20th, 2012Via: Wired: There once was a plan to turn over the main U.S. detention center in Afghanistan to control of the Afghans in 2011. That’s out the window. Instead, the military is offering millions to vastly expand the center’s inmate intake. Specifically, $35 million will fund expansions necessary to house “approximately 2,000 detainees” at the […]
Canada: Section 34 of the Online Surveillance Bill Would Give Orwellian Powers to Government-Appointed ‘Inspectors’
February 20th, 2012Via: CBC: Among other things, the bill requires ISPs to install surveillance technology and software to enable monitoring of phone and internet traffic. Section 34 is there to make sure ISPs comply. So what, exactly, does it say? Essentially, it says that government agents may enter an ISP when they wish, without a warrant, and […]
Britain: Details of Every Phone Call, Text Message, Email and Websites Visited Will Be Stored in Vast Corporate Databases for the Government to Access
February 20th, 2012Via: Telegraph: Landline and mobile phone companies and broadband providers will be ordered to store the data for a year and make it available to the security services under the scheme. The databases would not record the contents of calls, texts or emails but the numbers or email addresses of who they are sent and […]
‘What will the millions of middle-age, unskilled workers do when they are displaced by technology?’
February 19th, 2012My guess is that something like this will be part of the answer: Engineered H5N1: A Rare Time for Restraint in Science: Two scientific teams have recently engineered the H5N1 virus to make it readily transmissible between ferrets. Given that ferrets are considered the most reliable animal surrogate for human influenza infection, the newly engineered […]
SWIFT READY TO BLOCK IRANIAN BANK TRANSACTIONS
February 18th, 2012When I studied International Relations in college, we were taught that economic sanctions could be on par with, “Rockets and bombs,” as one professor put it, and potentially much worse. Questions about economic sanctions amounting to collective punishment and other violations of International Law are ignored by the perpetrators. These types of policies resulted in […]
FBI Manages to Produce Another ‘Homegrown’ Terrorism Spectacle
February 18th, 2012Via: Washington Post: The FBI and the U.S. Capitol Police arrested a Moroccan man Friday in downtown Washington after a lengthy investigation into an alleged plot to carry out a shooting spree and a suicide bombing at the Capitol. Amine el-Khalifi, 29, was picked up while carrying an inoperable MAC-10 automatic weapon and a fake […]
