Dvorak News Blog

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Is this the start of this generation’s Woodward and Bernstein-type
reporting on White House misconduct? Or is the White House simply trying to keep us safe from evildoers who happen to be in the media?

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

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Ever see the excellent 60′s TV show, The Prisoner (the crapfest of a pseudo remake on AMC a few years ago doesn’t count)? “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.” Guess we are well past that declaration.

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.
[...]
Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.

And then once they have this, they add in info from other databases, buy info from Amazon on purchases, purchase your searches from Google, your Facebook posts, and so on to get a well rounded picture of you. How comforting!