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Yesterday, the Department of Justice sent a letter to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The letter began: "This is to inform you that the United States Department of Justice is commencing an investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office…"  After years of skepticism about the "upside down" civil rights division in the past administration, it was a uniquely welcome moment.

The importance of this announcement cannot be underestimated for folks in Arizona, nor the level of disappointment that a failure to effectively follow through would engender. Arpaio, along with Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas and their allies in the Arizona legislature, have had free reign during the past five years to implement a reactionary agenda based on images of brown hordes ending the "American" way of life.

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has attacked deep packet inspection, a technique used to monitor traffic on the internet and other communications networks.

Speaking at a House of Lords event to mark the 20th anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee said that deep packet inspection (DPI) was the electronic equivalent of opening people’s mail.

The American Civil Liberties Union presented its reasons for Congress to establish a Select Committee to review U.S. surveillance policies at a panel discussion today entitled, “Domestic Surveillance: Next Steps.” As a panelist, Michael MacLeod-Ball, Chief Legislative and Policy Counsel for the Washington Legislative Office, talked about the need to reform intrusive surveillance powers which have resulted in the misuse of national security letters, untracked administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI that do not require going through a judge, as well as the wasteful use of taxpayer dollars spent monitoring peaceful law-abiding protestors in Maryland and Texas.

A tax collector in Surrey used the Canada Revenue Agency’s computers to look up personal information of young women he hoped to date, such as their addresses, income and marital status, according to internal government documents obtained by The Vancouver Sun.

Those documents also show he ended up dating, and then moving in with, one of the women whose privacy he violated....

The agency conducted an audit and discovered he had accessed roughly 60 personal tax files on agency computers that did not appear to be related to his job.

More than 20 of those unauthorized searches involved single Vancouver women born between 1970 and 1980, roughly the same age as the employee.

When CRA investigators interviewed the employee, he denied doing anything improper...

However, CRA investigators determined three of the women whose tax files he accessed matched a personal e-mail list he had on his computer.

And a fourth — whose tax file he searched twice in 2003 — was a woman he ended up living with briefly in late 2004 and 2005.

The CRA concluded the employee had used the agency’s computers for personal reasons, in violation of its ethics code.

Nobody wants to be under police surveillance. To go about our business without authorities spying on us is the hallmark of a free society. It is troubling, then, to see police in Saskatchewan embracing mass-surveillance technology that any police state would envy.

The first small steps seem reasonable enough. Through a program funded by SGI, police in Regina, Estevan and Prince Albert are using something called an automated licence plate recognition system to track disqualified drivers, among other things. It's the among other things where there might be a problem.

The system starts with small, mobile cameras mounted on police cars and programmed to look for and read licence plate numbers. When the camera sees a licence plate, as it would see many hundreds during the course of a routine patrol, the number is automatically entered in a computer database and compared with plate numbers of vehicles police are looking for. If there's a match, the officer is alerted by an audible alarm. Details of the match, whether the vehicle is stolen or registered to a disqualified driver, come up on the mobile computer screen. An apprehension soon thereafter ensues and the threat to traffic safety is removed. Who could be against that?

Unfortunately, the system does not discriminate. It records the time and place of every licence plate it sees. Police can thus keep a digital database of the time and place of every vehicle encountered by any of their numerous patrol cars. They can then search the database for a plate number -- your plate number, for instance -- and get at least a partial record of your vehicle's whereabouts during any particular period.

The federal government is quietly working on a controversial plan to collect biometric information from visitors to Canada, immigration department officials revealed

If all goes as planned, the new program will start in three to four years.

"The idea will be that we will take biometrics from people who are coming temporarily to Canada and need a visitor's visa -- temporary workers, students and visitors," Claudette Deschenes, assistant deputy minister in the immigration department told members of Parliament. "Those who don't need a visitor's visa to enter Canada will be taken at the port of entry."

Deschenes said the immigration department is working with the Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP on the project, which is currently in the planning stage.

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