ATLmalcontent

George W. knows what you ate for breakfast

Ho-hum; now the Department of Homeland Security is pointing spy satellite cameras intended for foreign enemies in our direction:

Spy satellites have served benign civilian purposes for decades, including mapmaking, conducting environmental studies and assessing damage after natural disasters. The administration has decided to broadly expand satellite use, however, to include not only security functions but to assist federal, state, local and tribal authorities in the enforcement of criminal and civil laws.

Effectively, there is no limit on the use of this high-tech equipment, which includes visual and nonvisual capabilities that can sense electromagnetic activity, radioactivity and chemical traces.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Congress has signed off on this expanded use of spy satellites and provided funding for it to begin this fall. An aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed the committee was aware of the program and was monitoring it. Yet, there appears to have been no plan to make it public until The Wall Street Journal broke the story last week.

Be careful what you google

In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy." ...

While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to "achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy," Privacy International said in an explanation of its findings.

Meanwhile ...

A jailed Chinese reporter accused of leaking state secrets has joined a U.S. lawsuit claiming Yahoo Inc. helped the Chinese government convict dissidents, his mother said Sunday.

Shi Tao, who was sentenced in 2005 to 10 years in prison, is seeking compensation from the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Internet company, claiming Yahoo Hong Kong and Yahoo China provided information to the Chinese authorities that led to his arrest.