Some excerpts from the article…

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

The full story can be found at http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000

Towards their last days, both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X questioned whether Black people could ever be free under capitalism. They saw that the system had been built on exploitation—and thus we need a new system.

For the full article by Eugene Puryear (Party for Socialism and Liberation), see http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=14392

Colorado’s 9News.com is reporting…

Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes says a Denver bike-sharing program could threaten residents’ “personal freedoms” because it is part of an attempt to control U.S. cities. He later said he is not against bicycling, but is concerned because he believes the sharing program is affiliated with an international group.

Maes said last week that an international environmental group is promoting Denver’s B-Cycle program and it is part of a “greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.”

“This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms,” Maes said in comments that were first reported Wednesday by The Denver Post.

They may have been dubbed the “Internet generation,” but young people are more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend. In fact, many of them don’t even know how to google properly.

For the complete story, go to http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710139,00.html

The Department of Justice (Department) is considering revising the regulations implementing title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA or Act) in order to establish requirements for making the goods, services, facilities, privileges, accommodations, or advantages offered by public accommodations via the Internet, specifically at sites on the World Wide Web (Web), accessible to individuals with disabilities. The Department is also considering revising the ADA’s title II regulation to establish requirements for making the services, programs, or activities offered by State and local governments to the public via the Web accessible. The Department is issuing this advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) in order to solicit public comment on various issues relating to the potential application of such requirements and to obtain background information for the regulatory assessment the Department must prepare if it were to adopt requirements that are economically significant according to Executive Order 12866.

For more information, see the proposed rule on the Federal Register website.

From the Maryland ACLU website:

The ACLU of Maryland is defending Anthony Graber, who potentially faces sixteen years in prison if found guilty of violating state wiretap laws because he recorded video of an officer drawing a gun during a traffic stop.  In a trend that we've seen across the country, police have become  increasingly hostile to bystanders recording their actions.  You can read some examples here, here and here.

However, the scale of the Maryland State Police reaction to Anthony Graber's video is unprecedented.  Once they learned of the video on YouTube, Graber's parents house was raided, searched, and four of his computers were confiscated.  Graber was arrested, booked and jailed.  Their actions are a calculated method of intimidation.  Another person has since been similarly charged under the same statute.

The wiretap law being used to charge Anthony Graber is intended to protect private communication between two parties.  According to David Rocah, the ACLU attorney handling Mr. Graber's case, "To charge Graber with violating the law, you would have to conclude that a police officer on a public road, wearing a badge and a uniform, performing his official duty, pulling someone over, somehow has a right to privacy when it comes to the conversation he has with the motorist."