spying

Senator Dodd was successful in postponing until January a debate over whether telecommunications companies such as AT&T should be given retroactive immunity for aiding and abetting the Bush administration in their warrantless wiretapping efforts.

This from Wired.com :

The presidential candidate threatened to filibuster and hold the Senate floor if the Senate shot down his amendment to strip immunity from the bill. That threat moved Reid to postpone a vote on the bill, so that the Senate could take up war funding bills, a massive domestic spending bill and changes to the Alternative Minimum Tax before the winter break.

[...]

Dodd spent nearly 10 hours on the Senate floor Monday, assaulting the administration's secret warrantless wiretapping program and channeling Senator Frank Church, whose investigation in the 1970s of the nation's intelligence services clandestine led to Congressional limits on government spying.

The fight is obviously not over, but at least with this stay of constitutional execution, civil liberties activists (and ... ahem ... netizens) will be able to spread the word even louder to their neighbors about how their phone and cable companies are spying on them.

See more at The Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Texas Border Watch went public today. You, too, can sign up to be a virtual border guard, and spend your days and nights monitoring the eight cameras along the border with Mexico. (On a sidenote, I can hardly wait for New York to launch its border watch, where we keep our eyes out for those pesky Ontarians and Quebecois trying to sneak into our fair land.)

This is what greets you if you go to the page:

Welcome
As part of the Virtual Neighborhood Border Watch Program, the State of Texas has been testing video surveillance cameras in different environments along the 1240 miles of Texas/Mexico border using the internet to transmit the images. The last stage of the test is to stress the system by providing pubic access to eight surveillance cameras.

Thank you for helping test this important capability.

To be part of the program you will need to have a user account. To get a user account click in the blue box on the right side of the screen.

NOTICE: You must turn off any pop-up blockers for this site. You may be asked to update your computer with software that allows you to view the video.

Um. No. Thank you. I don't think I want to register with your little citizen army at this time. I think it's kind of creepy that neighbors are watching neighbors with cameras. Last time I checked, that was called voyeurism, or illegal spying.