Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA) Gets Trolled on Facebook

To Cenk's point at the end, it is completely valid. Some people, primarily Cuccinelli's supporters, would say that it is none of anyone's business what Mr. Cuccinelli does with his wife. I would have two responses to this claim. One: if it is none of the voters' business what an elected official does with his partner, why is what the voters do with their partners any of the government's business? Two: what we are really talking about is whether or not the potential governor - leader of the Commonwealth of Virginia - has violated the very law for which he has ardently expressed support on multiple occasions. Asking a political candidate whether or not he has broken a law is completely above board. If the question is of too personal a nature for him to want to answer, then he needs to re-evaluate his support of that law.

This trolling couldn't have happened to a more deserving person.

Court Allows Chevron To Seize Americans' Email Data

From Mother Jones: 

Last month, a federal court granted Chevron access to nine years of email metadata—which includes names, time stamps, and detailed location data and login info, but not content—belonging to activists, lawyers, and journalists who criticized the company for drilling in Ecuador and leaving behind a trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines. Since 1993, when the litigation began, Chevron has lost multiple appeals and has been ordered to pay plaintiffs from native communities about $19 billion to cover the cost of environmental damage. Chevron alleges that it is the victim of a mass extortion conspiracy, which is why the company is asking Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, to cough up the email data. When Lewis Kaplan, a federal judge in New York, granted the Microsoft subpoena last month, he ruled it didn't violate the First Amendment because Americans weren't among the people targeted. 

Now Mother Jones has learned that the targeted accounts do include Americans—a revelation that calls the validity of the subpoena into question. The First Amendment protects the right to speak anonymously, and in cases involving Americans, courts have often quashed subpoenas seeking to discover the identities and locations of anonymous internet users. Earlier this year, a different federal judge quashed Chevron's attempts to seize documents from Amazon Watch, one of the company's most vocal critics. That judge said the subpoena was a violation of the group's First Amendment rights. In this case, though, that same protection has not been extended to activists, journalists, and lawyers' email metadata.

The moral of the story: if you want to be beyond the reach of the law, you should work for big oil.

Cuccinelli Makes Virginia a Punchline...Literally

Surveillance Program Will Be Challenged in Court

From Think Progress: 

Amie Stepanovich, Director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), announced that her organization is submitting a petition asking the Supreme Court to vacate Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court (FISC) ruling that authorized the National Security Agency’s (NSA) to siphon up metadata on all domestic phone calls on Monday. 

The announcement was made Thursday at a Restore the Fourth rally in Washington, DC — one of many public events around the country organized to protest the various surveillance programs revealed in recent NSA leaks. In an exclusive comment to ThinkProgress after the announcement, Stepanovich said “EPIC truly believes that this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court exceeded it’s authority, is not acting in accordance with the law and needs to be overturned — and cannot be allowed to continue conducting this surveillance. ”

Well, this was only a matter of time.

Big Government Conservatism in Mississippi

From Huffington Post: 

Mississippi will require doctors to collect umbilical cord blood from babies born to some young mothers, under a new law intended to identify statutory rapists and reduce the state's rate of teenage pregnancy, the highest in the country.

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Supporters of the law say it offers an important new tool to prevent older men from having sex with younger girls. Critics argue, however, that it violates privacy and will do little to deter teen pregnancy. 

"We think it's a very invasive law to a woman who is already in a vulnerable situation," said Carol Penick, executive director of the Women's Fund of Mississippi, a nonprofit organization dedicated to women's rights. 

Mississippi leads the nation in teen live-birth rates with 55 out of 1,000 babies born to young women between the ages of 15 and 19, according to 2010 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national average was 34.2 live births per 1,000 population and the lowest was 15.7, in New Hampshire, the CDC reported. 

Governor Phil Bryant said, "As governor, I am serious about confronting and reducing teen pregnancy in Mississippi. Unfortunately, part of this epidemic is driven by sexual offenders who prey on young girls. This measure provides law enforcement with another tool to help identify these men and bring them to justice."

Of course the best way to deal with high teen pregnancy rates is to have comprehensive sex-education instead of abstinence-only "education."

CISPA Is Dead Again...For Now

Employers Could Demand Your Facebook Password

Corporations Buying Our Privacy