7 Year Old Boy Removed from Father and Placed in State Custody Over mistaken Order of Hard Lemonade

Don'tTaseMeBlog.com

The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte's ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.

Ratte is a tenured professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan, which means that, on a given day, he's more likely to be excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey than watching "Dancing with the Stars" -- or even the History Channel, for that matter.

Paris to Quadruple number of CCTV Cameras

full article - Telegraph

Paris will quadruple the number of closed-circuit police cameras in its streets by the end of next year, after President Nicolas Sarkozy's promise to emulate London in an attempt to track crime and terrorism threats.

While the Paris metro and rail networks already operate around 9,500 CCTV devices, police have only 330 at their disposal to survey outside public areas. The new plan, dubbed "A Thousand Cameras for Paris", will raise that number to more than 1,200 – with most installed in high-risk areas and outside railway and underground stations.

Many of the current cameras are so low-resolution that the images are unusable in a court of law, local politicians say. Interior minister Michèle Alliot-Marie will draw up a charter to go with the new generation of cameras, limiting to 30 the days recorded images can be stored. There will be strict controls on who is allowed to view them.

Terrorist Watch List Hits One Million Names

aclu

"Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon."

"Putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning," said Steinhardt. "I doubt this thing would even be effective at catching a real terrorist."

The Average Briton Recorded 3000 Times per week

Telegraph

In one week, the average person living in Britain has 3,254 pieces of personal information stored about him or her, most of which is kept in databases for years and in some cases indefinitely.

The data include details about shopping habits, mobile phone use, emails, locations during the day, journeys and internet searches.
In many cases this information is kept by companies such as banks and shops, but in certain circumstances they can be asked to hand it over to a range of legal authorities.

This newspaper's findings come days after the Government published plans to grant local authorities and other public bodies access to the email and internet records of millions. Phone companies already retain data about their customers and give it to 650 public bodies on request.

Hidden spy camera to catch fly-tippers is taken to rubbish dump

Telegraph UK

The expensive camera was placed inside a black bag beside a notorious illegal fly-tipping site. The disguise was so good that workers for Chichester District Council, West Sussex, cleared the camera believing it was genuine rubbish.

A spokesman for Privacy International, the human rights group formed as a watchdog on surveillance and invasions of privacy, said: "It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad. It just goes to show why local authorities require greater scrutiny and accountability."