The State We're In

Elizabeth White for the AP "1 in 136 U.S. Residents Behind Bars"

"Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer.

The total on June 30, 2005, was 56,428 more than at the same time in 2004, the government reported Sunday. That 2.6 percent increase from mid-2004 to mid-2005 translates into a weekly rise of 1,085 inmates. (read entire article)

See also an earlier post:

"Chicago's Abu Ghraib: UN Committee Against Torture Hears Report on How Police Tortured Over 135 African-American Men Inside Chicago Jails" (read entire article)

By Matthew B. Stannard, Joe Garofoli in San Francisco Chronicle "Champion of Cyberspace Faces its Biggest Case Yet"

"Documents purportedly at the heart of a lawsuit accusing AT&T of collaborating with the National Security Agency to snoop on Americans appeared Monday on the Web, possibly shedding new light on surveillance techniques but also intensifying debate over the publication of leaked documents related to national security.

Wired News posted 29 pages that Editor in Chief Evan Hansen said were obtained from an unnamed source close to the lawsuit brought in January by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T. The foundation accuses AT&T of illegally turning over tens of millions of telephone and Internet records to the NSA in what it calls a "massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications." (read entire article)

From democracy now! "Freedom of the Press Under Attack: Government Begins Tracking Phone Calls of Journalists"

"Well, to start with, we were warned -- Rich Esposito and I were warned last week that the government was aware of who we were calling and that we should quickly get new cell phones that didn't come back to our names. An insider told us, a friendly insider who did not necessarily think this is a good idea. It was clear to us that somehow the government knew our records. We were told our phone calls weren't being recorded, but just who we were calling. Now, in terms of trying to track down insiders at the government who are providing us with information, that's really about all they need. That's how they essentially tracked down Mary McCarthy at the C.I.A. and got her in a polygraph and fired her based on who she was making contact with. This, for us, is quite chilling. The F.B.I. then, Amy, last night put out a statement essentially acknowledging that they are tracking phone calls of reporters. The person I talked to said, “Well, it may be more like backtracking.” But under this administration, what used to be hard to do, in going after reporters and their phone records, is now easy." (read entire article)

In democracy now! "How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with Radio Frequency Identification" (thanks (le colonel)

""Imagine a world of no more privacy. "Where your every purchase is monitored and recorded in a database, and your every belonging is numbered. Where someone many states away or perhaps in another country has a record of everything you have ever bought, of everything you have ever owned, of every item of clothing in your closet -- every pair of shoes. What's more, these items can even be tracked remotely. (read entire article)