The American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom established Choose Privacy Week in 2010 to help libraries work with their communities in navigating the complicated but vital issues of privacy rights. Privacy has long been a cornerstone of library services in America and a right that librarians defend every day. The theme for Choose Privacy Week 2012 is "Freedom from Surveillance."
For more information on Choose Privacy Week, visit privacyrevolution.org
When it comes to copyright infringement, the RIAA and Homeland Security’s ICE department have been working side by side to take down the pirates. The RIAA tells the feds who they think are in the wrong; the feds investigate, and then determine if they have the right to seize the domain for that site. But that’s not exactly the case. We’ll give you an example of where they seized first, and then investigated.
In other words, having goaded the government into an outrageous and very public seizure of the blog, the RIAA members refused to follow up and answer the government’s questions. In turn, the government acted shamefully, not returning the blog or apologizing for its apparent mistake, but instead secretly asking the court to extend the seizure and deny Dajaz1 the right to seek return of its property or otherwise get due process. The government also refused to answer Congressional questions about the case. ICE finally released the domain name in December of 2011, again with no explanation.
The government failed to do its job. It did not represent the citizens of the United States. It did, however, cow-tow to the RIAA.
Last week, Houston METRO announced they were placing TSA agents on buses. This week, there was a huge backlash as Houston saw its citizens revolt.
After an uproar, METRO says it never did any bag searches and never intended to, that the official METRO blog saying so was just a mistake.
“There was never an intention to do bag searches,” METRO President and Chairman George Grenias said.
There aren’t any photos of searches and METRO says none were done. After Thursday’s showdown, the METRO chairman said it will stay that way so long as he is chairman.
“It’s not going to happen while I am chairman — putting in place random searches and seizures. We’re going to get to the bottom of this and we’ll have a lot more dialogue,” Garcia said.
Police in Portland Oregon tasered an innocent man, Dan Halsted, then beat him after mistaking him for a tagger. Next, they lie in court, attempting to frame him and justify their attack. In the end, Halsted was awarded $250,000.
US Representative Francisco Canseco has come forward to state that he was assaulted by the TSA. He’s not happy with the way the TSA performs patdowns.
“The agent was very aggressive in his pat-down, and he was patting me down where no one is supposed to go,” said Canseco. “It got very uncomfortable so I moved his hand away. That stopped everything and brought in supervisors and everyone else.”
Unfortunately, Canseco has been living under a bridge with no communication to the outside world. Americans have been complaining for nearly two years over this type of pat-down. They’ve been writing how invasive the pat-downs are and have been begging Congress to eliminate these useless procedures. As usual, it’s not important to Congress until they’re inconvenienced or made uncomfortable.
What Canseco doesn’t seem to understand is that his idea of a simple moving his hand away constitutes assault on a TSA agent. That’s why TSA supervisors and the police were brought in. It is likely that he wasn’t cited or arrested because it was discovered that he is a Congressman. Others have not been so fortunate. Canseco’s “sit down” with the TSA is unlikely to change anything.
