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Big Brother is in your car

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If you’re on the road, the government likely knows where. Surveillance of drivers is increasing, and appears legal
If you’re traveling on public roadways in 2012, there’s a very good chance you’re being watched, by one government agency or another. License plate readers (LPRs) are proliferating at a rapid clip, and they’re being used by law enforcement at virtually every level of government.
Once used mostly by local cops to catch car thieves and unregistered drivers, LPR systems have morphed into what privacy activists call an increasingly pervasive network of mass surveillance. Databases all over the country maintained by local police departments – and now federal agencies too — contain hundreds of millions of location scans, and provide a searchable record of the movements of all kinds of drivers, from murderers to pizza delivery guys, and from soccer moms to serial rapists.
The inconspicuous devices are sometimes installed at fixed points, as the DEA has been doing in several border states, but they’re most often mounted on local police cruisers, where they automatically scan and record every license plate that comes within range of their optical sensor.
When they pass an LPR-equipped police car, drivers both innocent and guilty have their whereabouts recorded and tagged with GPS coordinates, along with a color photo and a time stamp. The resulting information is often kept for years, allowing law enforcement to engage in a kind of retroactive surveillance to find out who was where, and at what time.
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German court backs Catholic ‘pay to pray’ rule

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BERLIN –  Germany’s top administrative court has ruled that Catholics who opt out of paying religious taxes must automatically leave the church as well.
The court’s verdict Wednesday is a victory for the Catholic Church in Germany, which receives more than euro4 billion ($5.14 billion) annually from a surcharge of up to nine percent on income tax bills of registered Catholics.

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Congressman battling powerful electric power industry in re-election bid

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WASHINGTON – The congressman who first brought the potentially catastrophic effects of an electromagnetic pulse event to the nation’s attention is now under fire from the electric power industry that has fought voluntary efforts to protect the national grid with hardened transformers.
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., is fighting for re-election against the influences of the powerful electric power industry lobby.
Bartlett recently won an initial victory with the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which agreed with him on Oct. 18 that the electric power industry must be required to submit a plan to protect the national power grid from a catastrophic blackout that could be inflicted by a solar super storm.
The victory also comes at a time when the U.S. East coast is experiencing a “perfect storm”– this time on land – that could affect the lives of 60 million people in terms of electrical outages, floods and the massive destruction of property.

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