I had met Shirley Newsome a couple of times before she got up and spoke at the public comment hearing Tuesday evening. It wasn’t a surprise to me that she was there. Shirley Newsome is the definition of being involved in her community, and the hearing allowed people to comment on a new plan for…
Category: Surveillance
Obama’s secret plan to harvest personal data from social networking websites
Ken Boehm reports that the: NLPC [National Legal and Policy Center] has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites. The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails,…
Opinion: Obama takes stand for secrecy, executive power
Over on Politico, Josh Gerstein writes: President Barack Obama’s administration is escalating a legal showdown which has the Justice Department defending official secrecy and executive power with arguments more associated with former Vice President Dick Cheney than the White House’s newest occupants. On Wednesday afternoon, the Justice Department filed an appeal and a request for…
Feds ask appeals court to stay drug decision
USA Today has a story by Ronald Blum of the Associated Press reporting that federal prosecutors have asked an appeals court to stay its decision [pdf] that government agents illegally seized the drug testing records and samples of more than 100 major league baseball players (see this post for previous coverage of the decision and…