Government Spying

Former AT&T technician Mark Klein has come forward to support the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T for its alleged complicity in the NSA's electronic surveillance.

All I can do is emphasize again, that they’re copying everything, this is a violation of the Constitution, it’s domestic traffic, it’s phone calls as well as e-mail and something should be done to stop it and Congress should not kill the judicial process.

"An exact copy of all Internet traffic that flowed through critical AT&T cables -- e-mails, documents, pictures, Web browsing, voice-over-Internet phone conversations, everything -- was being diverted to equipment inside the secret room," he said.

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One day he found that the splitters were hard-wired into a secret room on the sixth floor.

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Here Come The Gangs

Criminalizing an activity will lead to gangs controlling, protecting, and trafficking in the criminalized activity. There should be no surprise that after Sweden criminalized paying for sex, there are more gangs. The typical government response is to increase the laws, domestic spying, and policing. A rational response would be to undo the unhelpful legislation.


Swedish Mafia: fighting a losing battle
Published: 8th November 2007 20:21 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/9046/

To an outsider, Sweden would seem an unlikely place to find rising gang crime. But the problem has snowballed since the nineties, leaving police clamouring for better tools to deal with the problem. Daniel Boman reports.

Sweden is not a country usually associated with mafia-style gang crimes. But over the last decade a new breed of organized crime has sunk its claws into Sweden, leaving the authorities several steps behind.
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Prostitution in Sweden

Prostitution in Sweden is technically illegal, since it is a crime to purchase the service. Sweden considers prostitution a form of violence against women so the crime does not lie in the prostitute selling sexual services, but in the customer's buying of such services.[1]

In 1907 prostitution was legalized;[2] in 1999 the act of buying the service was criminalized.[3]

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Outpouring Of Support

Tuesday November 6, 2007 05:10 EST
The Ron Paul phenomenon

(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V - Update VI - Update VII)

By far the most significant and interesting political story of the past 24 hours is the extraordinary, record-breaking outpouring of support for Ron Paul's presidential campaign. Therefore, it is being ignored by much of our establishment press -- not a single article about it in The New York Times or The Washington Post (though it is discussed on a couple of their blogs), nor even a mention of it on the websites of CNN or CBS News (which found space to report on Stephen Colbert's non-candidacy). But MSNBC and Fox News did at least both post the AP article on the Paul story.

Regardless of how much attention the media pays, the explosion of support for the Paul campaign yesterday is much more than a one-time event. The Paul campaign is now a bona fide phenomenon of real significance, and it is difficult to see this as anything other than a very positive development.

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.25 Per Decade

Climate change is showing .25 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.