Tales of a shady world

I promise to make hot lunches free too!

McCain and Hillary’s unvarnished ploy for votes — the supposed “tax holiday” on gas sales across the country — is under an intense barrage of criticism.

Signs of the surveillance state

In Detroit, a mail carrier ‘illegally’ tipped off a resident that he was under postal surveillance, meaning all mail addressed to him was being tracked.

Courts have ruled that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the address information on their mail, and mail covers have a long and storied history in the annals of domestic surveillance. In the 1970s, the Church Committee found that the CIA and FBI had used the mail cover program as a front to secretly open, copy and re-seal some 215,000 letters, in a single spying operation run from an office in New York.

Thanks for the heads up, THREAT LEVEL. Next time I’m sending something shady, I’ll choose not to do it through the government.

Meanwhile, DANGER ROOM keeps us apprised of the ongoing CCTV orgy in Great Britain. This time the government is issuing cameras to school crossing guards:

Divide and conquer

I’m always complicit in furthering internecine battles between cable news outlets: