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At issue is a Jan. 31, 2006 lawsuit, and others that followed, alleging violations of the Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless searches and seizures. The cases, about three dozen which will be consolidated into two oral arguments, have been thrown out of court on a variety of grounds, chiefly the government’s claim that the lawsuits would expose state secrets, and a 2008 law that immunized the nation’s telcos from such lawsuits.

Nearly six years later, the merits of the lawsuits have never been addressed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which brought the leading cases, appealed, and contends that the litigation should never have been dismissed.

“As far as we know the surveillance is ongoing,” says Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director, who will be arguing before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle. “I think it is tremendously important that Americans not be subject to dragnet surveillance by the government. I think the Fourth Amendment, the right to privacy, is important for this country.”

Threat Level will cover the arguments from the courtroom Wednesday afternoon. The hearing is expected to begin at 2:00 p.m. and last at least two hours.

The Obama administration is set to urge the court to let stand the lower-court decisions dismissing the lawsuits. What’s more, the government contends, litigation against the government and the telcos must die because it threatens to expose government secrets and undermine national security.

“Congress made a legislative policy judgment that, if litigation of this kind were permitted to proceed, firms that may have assisted the nation at a critical time would be improperly burdened and sensitive classified information might be improperly disclosed,” Thomas Bondy, a Justice Department attorney, told the appeals panel in a court brief.

The EFF’s allegations are based in part on internal AT&T documents allegedly outlining secret rooms in AT&T offices that route internet traffic to the NSA. Every major telecom carrier in the United States is now named in at least one of the surveillance lawsuits for allegedly cooperating with the government’s warrantless surveillance program.

Sources within the top level management of the police in Oslo have confirmed to Aftenposten that the drill finished at 15:00 that same Friday. The bomb attributed to Breivik went off only 26 minutes after the anti-terror drill finished, according to officials.

According to Aftenposten all of the officers from the anti-terror unit who took part in the action and arrest of Breivik had a full week training on a mobile terrorist attack scenario in which one or more perpetrators only goal is to shoot as many people as possible and then shoot the police when they arrive.

The plight of the Valley’s desert dwellers made regional headlines when county officials ordered the destruction of Phonehenge: a towering, colorful castle constructed out of telephone poles by retired phone technician Kim Fahey. Fahey was imprisoned and charged with several misdemeanors.

But Fahey is just one of many who’ve been targeted by the NATs, which were assembled at the request of County Supervisor Mike Antonovich in 2006. LA Weekly reporter Mars Melnicoff wrote an in-depth article in which she exposed the county’s tactic of badgering residents with minor, but costly, code violations until they face little choice but to vacate the land altogether.

Lurid Mexican media accounts reported that an armed gang invaded Fernandez’s home, sliced open his arm with a pair of scissors and extracted a satellite-enabled tracking device, leaving the chip and a streak of blood behind.

Fernandez was freed seven months later with little explanation, but the gruesome details of his crude surgery have not dissuaded thousands of worried Mexicans from seeking out similar satellite and radio-frequency tracking products — including scientifically dubious chip implants — as abductions in the country soar.

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In recent years, all manner of Mexican media reports have featured the chips, with some estimating that as many as 10,000 people are walking around with the implants. Even former Attorney General Rafael Macedo told reporters in 2004 that he had a chip embedded “so that I can be located at any moment wherever I am.”

That’s pure science fiction – a sham – say RFID researchers and engineers in the United States. Any device that could communicate with satellites or even the local cellular network would need a battery and sizable antenna, like a cellphone, they say.

“It’s nonsense,” said Mark Corner, an RFID researcher at the University of Massachusetts.

Standing before an easel on a Van Nuys sidewalk, Alex Schaefer dabbed paint onto a canvas.

“There you have it,” he said. “Inflammatory art.”

The 22-by-28-inch en plein air oil painting is certainly hot enough to inflame Los Angeles police.

Twice they’ve come to investigate why the 41-year-old Eagle Rock artist is painting an image of a bank building going up in flames.

Schaefer had barely added the orange-and-yellow depiction of fire shooting from the roof of a Chase Bank branch when police rolled up to the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Sylvan Street on July 30.

“They told me that somebody had called and said they felt threatened by my painting,” Schaefer said.

“They said they had to find out my intention. They asked if I was a terrorist and was I going to follow through and do what I was painting.”

No, Schaefer said. He explained that the artwork was intended to be a visual metaphor for the havoc that banking practices have caused to the economy.

A terrorist certainly would not spend hours on a public sidewalk creating an oil painting of his intended target, he told the officers.

The police took down his name, address and telephone number on a form — Schaefer declined to provide his Social Security number — and departed.

“They were friendly. They weren’t intimidating,” he said. “I figured that when they left, they probably decided the episode was stupid and they’d just wad up the form and throw it away.”

Wrong. On Tuesday, two more officers showed up at Schaefer’s home. This time they were plainclothes detectives.

“One of them asked me, ‘Do you hate banks? Do you plan to do that to the bank?’ ” Schaefer again explained what his painting symbolizes.

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Schaefer said he has been surprised by the hubbub his burning bank has caused.

Even as Irene weakened to a tropical storm, authorities in the region warned that its impact was not waning.

“We’re not out of the woods yet. Irene remains a large and potentially dangerous storm,” U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters.

As President Barack Obama puts together a new jobs plan to be revealed shortly after Labor Day, he is up against a powerful force, long in the making, that has gone virtually unnoticed in the debate over how to put people back to work: Employers are increasingly giving up on the American man.

If that sounds bleak, it’s because it is. The portion of men who work and their median wages have been eroding since the early 1970s. For decades the impact of this fact was softened in many families by the increasing number of women who went to work and took up the slack. More recently, the housing bubble helped to mask it by boosting the male-dominated construction trades, which employed millions. When real estate ultimately crashed, so did the prospects for many men. The portion of men holding a job—any job, full- or part-time—fell to 63.5 percent in July—hovering stubbornly near the low point of 63.3 percent it reached in December 2009. These are the lowest numbers in statistics going back to 1948. Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely noticeable improvement from its low point last year—and still well below the depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never dropped below 85 percent. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that in 1969, 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job.

An unusually large number of people may be affected by Irene because it is forecast to stay just offshore — and thus retain much of its power — as it inches up the coast from North Carolina to New England. When a hurricane hits land, it quickly loses steam.

High winds are the biggest threat to utility wires and poles. Recent heavy rains in the region have made trees even more vulnerable to toppling over. Flooding can cause problems for power plants, which are often located near rivers or other bodies of water.