(Image is in the Public Domain)

While this is barely legal (if it IS legal), I don't particularly have a problem with cell phone companies opening their data to police to help find a person reported as missing. That is, of course, assuming that they don't abuse the power and that missing persons are defined correctly.

As with most government powers, as long as there is independent oversight and proper consequences for abuse, who cares what powers they actually have?

Don't tempt pointless attention

(Image is in the Public Domain)

The EFF has an excellent article about how to avoid being searched at the border. Specifically, how to protect your laptop data that courts recently ruled could be searched without warrant.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

In case you didn't already know, state offices posting "public" records online for anyone in the world to see is a huge and persistent problem.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

In case you didn't know already, voting machines are hackable and otherwise, just plain poop. Any state that's using them should be sued. Now a man has used voting machine print-outs to prove that they are adding votes incorrectly.

(Image used under: Fair Use doctrine)

Not only did a lady win almost $3 million for suing equifax, but now they have to pay another half million in attorney fees. The story is that Equifax refused to fix her credit report after she was a victim of identity theft.

(Image is used under the Pixabay license)

There's a bill winding it's way through the muck in the capitol building. If this bill becomes law, it would preemptively prevent DNA-based discrimination, get this: before it becomes a problem. In the past, congress has been reluctant to pass laws that would prevent a problem before it gets out of control because they lack foresight or because their pockets were so full of cash that they couldn't concentrate on upholding the rights of the little people.

GINA would make it illegal for health insurers to raise premiums or deny coverage based on genetic information, and would prohibit employers from using such information for decisions on hiring, firing, promotions or job assignments.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

The FBI, which is proving to to be the worst thing to happen to America since dubya, is pushing for laws that will require your Internet Service Providers to record all that you do and make it available for police review.

"Records retention by ISPs would be tremendously helpful in giving us a historic basis to make a case on a number of child pornographers who use the Internet to push their pornography" or lure children, Mueller said.

Yes it would. But it would also allow them to many other things that might not be so justified. If we've learned anything, its that the FBI can't be trusted with unchecked snooping powers.

(Image used under: Fair Use doctrine)

From the "Well flipping duh" committee as assisted by the "It's about freaking time" guild, a NJ court has ruled that we have privacy rights online and that "law enforcement officials need a grand jury warrant to have access to their private information".

What you got in there?

(Image is in the Public Domain)

You can be forced to turn it on and let border agents browse around for stuff to charge you with. Isn't that nice?

(Image is in the Public Domain)

First the FBI was going to put the DNA of innocent people on permenant file, but now they're going to drag in the DNA of any relatives to the offenders as well.

He was a church-going father of two, and for more than 30 years Dennis Rader eluded police in the Wichita area, killing 10 people and signing taunting letters with a self-styled monogram: BTK, for Bind Torture Kill. In the end, it was a DNA sample that tied BTK to his crimes. Not his own DNA. But his daughter's.

Investigators obtained a court order without the daughter's knowledge for a Pap smear specimen she had given five years earlier at a university medical clinic in Kansas. A DNA profile of the specimen almost perfectly matched the DNA evidence taken from several BTK crime scenes, leading detectives to conclude she was the child of the killer. That allowed police to secure an arrest warrant in February 2005 and end BTK's murderous career.

The sad thing here is that the practice could be used to do great good, but we can't let the FBI ever have the power to do this because they can't be trusted to use it properly.