Police State

More on FBI's terrorist entrapment program.

French electronic surveillance is worse than the NSA.

More information on NSA's spying on games.

"In the time since I spoke to General Wallace, virtual worlds have bloomed. The number of Second Life accounts, for example, has grown to 36 million registered users, according to its creator, Linden Labs. And it seems, as the Times and ProPublica reported, that a surprising number of those new visitors were from the U.S. Intelligence Community. Second Life, in fact, became so thick with spies from the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI that it was necessary to create what one of the leaked documents called a "deconfliction" group to keep them from duplicating their efforts, spying on one another, and so turning their online push into a digital snarl.
And yet, after all that virtual snooping, there is no evidence that the untold millions of dollars spent infiltrating digital spies into worlds of pixies, scantily-clad lion-women, and pony skeleton avatars (no, I’m not making these up) has uncovered any terrorists or foiled any al-Qaeda plots. It has, however, allowed the U.S. government to penetrate the lives of the young (and increasingly, the not-so-young) in new and intrusive ways."

Just amazing.

"It should be no secret that the United States has the biggest, most efficiently organized, most effective system for recruiting child soldiers in the world. With uncharacteristic modesty, however, the Pentagon doesn’t call it that. Its term is "youth development program."
Pushed by multiple high-powered, highly paid public relations and advertising firms under contract to the Department of Defense, the program is a many splendored thing. Its major public face is the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps or JROTC."

I never thought of it that way.