Jeff Atwood muses on how life is becoming more public.

This election season, Michael Schiavo founded TerriPAC, a politicial action committee to work against the sort of government interference in family matters that saw Bill Frist make “diagnoses” from watching a short video tape, Congress called into emergency session, etc.

Twenty of the Senators and Representatives who voted to stop Michael from terminating life support were defeated this week (not counting the ones who didn’t run again, or have been indicted).

Every single one of the people who know what the Federal Government is supposed to do and voted to stay out of it was re-elected, including the Republicans.

Bruce Schneier has some thoughts on the subject.

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with.

Thanks for MisterX for the pointer.

Some smart folks have put together Portable Firefox and The Onion Router to come up with TorPark, allowing you to anonymously surf the net. All the files stay on the USB drive, and Tor obscures your IP address. Of course, if there’s a keylogger on the terminal, or if you change the TorPark settings, all bets are off.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the useful pointer.

<JayneCobb>Yep. Saw that one coming.</JayneCobb>

Law professor Michael Froomkin decides not to let a bored TSA agent search him for something to do.

There is something spookily appropriate about having an airport security officer lie to you in order to try to violate your civil rights, even in a relatively small way, when you are en route to a convention about technology and freedom.

I just added myself to the Distributed BoingBoing project, to work around “Smartfilter”’s identification of BoingBoing as a nudity site. If you have some spare bandwidth, I urge you to install the script yourself and fight stupidware. :-)

I have to get me some of this.

Thanks, Laura!

BoingBoing tells us about an undercover news investigation where in all but three of the stations where their reporters attempted to get forms to file complaints against officers, they weren’t able to get them.

In fact, one of the officers caught on hidden camera took the station to court to prevent the airing of the story: the preliminary injunction was denied.

Looks like this internet story is starting to go around again. Snopes verifies it, but the date is last year, so it probably isn’t something you have to worry about happening in the next few days.

Bottom line: never, ever give out any financial information to someone who calls you, even if they have enough information to make you think that they’re the real institution.