Of course John didn't actually blackmail anyone, but he made a valid point that sometimes the only way for things to get done is for Congress to feel the problem actually affects them. To prove his point of how vile and dangerous unregulated data-brokering is, he used completely legal and commonly used techniques to get data about several members of Congress with a vague threat that if they were worried about what he found, they really ought to consider passing laws to prevent the kind of data gathering he used.

This video should be required watching for every US Citizen because data brokering is dangerous. If you need any proof, well… that's what the video is for (but you can also look at the ID Theft crisis which was almost entirely caused by data brokering). Tags: Congress, Identity Theft, John Oliver

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Some US senators are not happy about the new privacy changes and have sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg about it.

Facebook now obligates users to make publicly available certain parts of their profile that were previously private. If the user does not want to connect to a page with other users from their current town or university, the user will have that information deleted altogether from their profile.

If you read the entire letter, you can clearly see that they actually know what they're talking about. Surprising really.

Confused by the bailout? Who isn't?

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A little translation for the rest of us.

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Sarah Palin's Yahoo account has been broken into and e-mails found there posted to Wikileaks. I would say this was a pretty rotten thing to do, but the perpetrators claim they did it to prove that Palin has been using her private e-mail to circumvent recordkeeping laws about government business. If that's true, then perhaps this needed to happen.

What should we do about privacy problems? Attack the person who found the problem!

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When Betty Ostergren, otherwise known as the "Virginia Watchdog" and on of my personal heroes, started posting social security numbers and other private data about state senators, she turned a few heads.

She got the information from the state's own public records websites where the senators were quick to pull some strings to get their information off the sites, but Betty refused to pull it off hers until they fixed the system that left all the other less-connected people vulnerable.

Their response was to draft a law for her specifically (what an honor!) that would make it illegal to disseminate any public records that contained Social Security numbers. Facing tens of thousands of dollars in fines, she was fortunately rescued by the Virginia ACLU who filed a lawsuit on her behalf.

And the good news is that the right decision was reached and the state of Virginia was told to eat crow. The saddest and sickest part of the whole situation is that they violently attacked the person who publicized what they were doing wrong while they made no effort to fix the wrong she exposed.

Why do we need to hold people accountable for abuse?

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I found this online petition to remove Pelosi for failing to do her job and being a political hack. Even if Congress couldn't pull an actual impeachment (which I believe they could for trying to block investigations of the White House staff alone), then they could still do something.

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There's still no way in Hades that I'll ever vote for McCain, but Obama has been sorely disappointing recently. First he voted for Telco immunity despite his promises to filibuster any such attempt. Now Republicans have cleverly used web technology to alert them (and us) to changes on his website. Specifically to the pages that list his policies.

George W. Bush

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Here's a take that I'm ashamed to admit I hadn't considered: Members of Congress may be protecting Bush because of votes they made previously that might seem to have supported his illegal activities. While it might not end in prosecution, it could end their Congressional careers.

So, of course key Congressional Democrats who were made aware of these illegal torture and surveillance programs are going to protect the Bush administration and other lawbreakers. If you were Jay Rockfeller or Nancy Pelosi, would you want there to be investigations and prosecutions for torture programs that, to one degree or another, you knew about? If you were Jane Harman, wouldn't you be extremely eager to put a stop to judicial proceedings that were likely to result in a finding that surveillance programs that you knew about, approved of, and helped to conceal were illegal and unconstitutional?