From Boing Boing (http://www.boingboing.net/):

Zed sez: "An Indian-born Canadian citizen was flying home from India to Toronto, and transferring at O'Hare. INS decided her passport was funny-looking, destroyed it, denied her access to the Canadian consul, and deported her to India via Kuwait with her papers in such disorder she might not have been able to get into India if Kuwaiti and Indian authorities hadn't been so co-operative."

Permanent link to Boing Boing post: (http://boingboing.net/2003_02_01_archive.html#90351481)

US INS destroys Canadian woman's passport, sends her to India

More news from the front lines of the War on Technology.

] Recording companies have asked the Federal Court to allow
] their computer experts to scan all computers at the
] University of Melbourne for sound files and email
] accounts, so they can gather evidence of claimed
] widespread breaches of copyright.

Continuing their attacks on the schools...

] The University of Melbourne, which is opposing the
] recording companies' application for preservation and
] access, said it had cautioned two students about
] inappropriate material the MP3 sound files and had
] disabled the links to record from their personal web
] pages. It said there was no indication that any copying
] has been undertaken.

And the schools are fighting..

] One of the student's web pages had a list of his top
] 15 songs, with the following invitation: "These are
] my favourites and here are the links to my MP3 file."

Great.. Not much reading between the lines you have to do here to see why I'm so worried about this stuff..

] Justice Brian Tamberlin asked: "Where did he get them from?"
] Mr Bannon: "I don't know."
] "Where are they stored?" asked the judge.
] "That's another thing we don't know," was the reply.

Someday, I can picture myself having a similar dialog.

] Mr Bannon argued the companies should have access to
] email accounts, as evidence of an email with an MP3
] attachment would prove that copying and transmission
] had occurred. He said one of the students had 500 MP3
] files.

Great.. They will want to see our email. Love that. One more reason I'm glad I'm always pressing folks to use PGP.

Recording firms ask to scan university computers - smh.com.au

] The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted unanimously to slap
] restrictions on a controversial Pentagon data-mining
] program that critics say would amount to a domestic
] spying apparatus.

Senate limits Pentagon 'snooping' plan - Tech News - CNET.com

] Anyone is welcome to grab my crotch, I don't require
] dinner and a movie, just ask me. Is that asking too much?
] You wanna grab my crotch, please ask. Does that seem like
] a crazy person to you?" I had about 4 of them standing
] around. Finally Metro PD shows up. It's really
] interesting. First of all, the cop is a BIG P&T fan and
] that ain't hurting. Second, I get the vibe that he is WAY
] sick of these federal leather-sniffers. He has that vibe
] that real cops have toward renta-cops. This is working
] WAY to my advantage, so I play it.

Funny story. Same situation as that "Coffee or Tea" story thats been going around, only Penn handled the situation better.

Sounds fair to me.. You should ask before grabbing someone's crank. You know, give them a heads up.. "I'm going to grab your crotch." Totally reasonable solution to what appears to be a common problem at airport security checks.

Penn loves your freedom and his disposable income

] "I have long maintained that we are headed to a future of
] completely transparency, where both personal privacy and
] institutional secrecy would vanish and we would be
] forced, as are people in small, gossip-y towns, to create
] societies tolerant enough to accept an certain amount of
] personally eccentric behavior and even private, though
] widely-known, scandals. Instead, we know seem headed into
] a future where The All-Seeing Eye can know everything
] about us and we can know - or say - nothing about It. I
] can't imagine leaving a less promising future to my
] descendents. Nor can I imagine why the American people
] are so willing to inflict such a future on their kids
] that driving a few blocks to vote against it was too much
] trouble."

There is alot I want to say about both these articles. I'll likely revisit this.

Highly recommended read.

Another Barlow Rant about TIA

Disturbing article about a provision of the No Child Left Behind Act, which forces public secondary schools to give military recruiters the names and addresses of attending students or get their federal aid cut. An act that lives up to its title.

Military Demanding Names of Children

As with the Patriot Act, TIPS is being pursued as part of the so-called war against terrorism. It is a Department of Justice project.

This my friends, is the line you do not cross..

US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies

The FBI effort, authorized by the antiterrorism law enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks, is the first broad government check of library records since the 1970s when prosecutors reined in the practice for fear of abuses."

FBI Begins Visiting Libraries

As soon as he activated it, FBI agents quickly triangulated his position between two rural towns and had him in handcuffs within an hour Tuesday, according to Nevada authorities.

Mad Bomber Traced by Cell Phone

She used the example that the credit card companies come to know a pattern of a customer's charges so well that they can identify when the card is being used fraudulently and query the customers. "That's a private based system that works well. There's also a private based system that's abused," she said. She did not elaborate on abuses."

United Press International: Ridge eyes new driver's licenses