The War on Privacy

The folks at TPM have found another Yoo memo, this one only 37 pages long, and discovered that one of the conclusions there was that the 4th amendment, which protects against "unreasonable search and seizure" did not apply in anti-terror investigations.

Seriously, these guys had no concept as to the rule of law. They really hate everything that out founding fathers worked for.

The memo is no longer in effect, but little known state agencies known as "fusion centers" have been sucking up every bit of personal data they can find:

• New York and other states also tap into a Federal Trade Commission database with information about hundreds of thousands of identity-theft reports.
• Pennsylvania buys credit reports and uses face-recognition software to examine driver's license photos.
• Rhode Island has access to car-rental databases
• Maryland, authorities rely on a little-known data broker called Entersect, which claims it maintains 12 billion records about 98 percent of Americans, including cell phone records.

See the ACLU report here.