A ferry ride to an Orwellian future?

A must-read by Peter Eichenberger:

How does it feel that North Carolina is becoming a center for profits amid the blatant and egregious blurring of law enforcement and corrections?

With the great sucking sound, that of the vacuuming of personal information of law-abiding Americans emanating from DeeCee, I would enjoin all of you out there to study more carefully what your legislators are turning this place into--just another arm of the entity, the U.S. government, which has gotten us into more huge messes than I have time or interest in recounting.

With regards to corporations like GEO and Blackwater, like with tow-truck drivers or bondsmen, private enforcement means you lose your constitutional rights. Not only are there almost no legal limits to what they can do, but their procedures and policies are often kept from oversight for "proprietary" reasons. Vis the Wackenhut juvenile facility in Louisiana that saved money by not providing the inmates with clothing--you know, costs and all.

More like this

One of the standard arguments we hear from the Hate the ACLU crowd is that the ACLU is that they are "getting rich on taxpayer money" because, in some cases, Federal law allows plaintiffs who sue government agencies successfully to recover their legal fees. It's an argument based primarily on…
Good ol' Judge Roy Moore, the Christian supremacist former Alabama supreme court justice, thinks HR 2679 (which I refer to as the Tonya Harding bill - if you can't beat the ACLU in court, hobble them on the way up the steps) is a dandy idea. And you're gonna love the hypocritical rhetoric he uses…
Last week, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled that retaining DNA samples from innocent individuals in a national law enforcement databank violates human rights. The ruling is a direct blow to Britain's DNA databank, which holds samples and data for 7% of its citizens (4.5 million…
An article in the Wall Street Journal notes the collision between researchers' interests in personal safety and the public's right to know how its money is being spent -- specifically, when that money funds research that involves animals: The University of California was sued last summer by the…

There was a report on the BBC that said that the for profit prisons in Britan are more subject to corruption due to low wages and poor working conditions. I didn't follow it up, I think it was a reporter in the Guardian or Independent who went undercover for a number of months. It seems that the for profit prison was mostly run by the prisoners.

The only way to understand conservatives is by keeping your eyes on the money. Everything that has happened under the Republcans for the last six years has had looting the treasury as its primary motive. And on top of that they are borrowing and stealing as fast as they can. They are teenage thugs who have your car and credit card and they'r egoing to ruin you.

Hey, I've got a good idea. Let's put a complete copy of the whole Google database in some little town in North Carolina. None of those pesky California Constitution privacy rules will apply to data stored there.

Oh, wait ....

By Hank Roberts (not verified) on 21 Apr 2007 #permalink