…the court said that the Second Amendment does not confer a right to carry weapons beyond the home, and therefore the law was within the Legislature’s authority.

What!? The Second Amendment doesn’t allow a person to carry a firearm beyond the home? What world are those justices living in? At 18 a person can join the military and vote for the leader of the free world, both of which impart far more responsibility on that person than carrying a firearm. This is another example, out of hundreds, of our inconsistent laws.

We now live in a world where public servants informing the public about government behavior or wrongdoing must practice the tradecraft of drug dealers and spies. Otherwise, these informants could get caught in the web of administrations that view George Orwell’s 1984 as an operations manual.

Much of this data is invisible to people and seems impersonal. But it’s not. What modern data science is finding is that nearly any type of data can be used, much like a fingerprint, to identify the person who created it: your choice of movies on Netflix, the location signals emitted by your cell phone, even your pattern of walking as recorded by a surveillance camera. In effect, the more data there is, the less any of it can be said to be private, since the richness of that data makes pinpointing people “algorithmically possible,” says Princeton University computer scientist Arvind Narayanan.

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf)  is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

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A letter to Defense Distributed from the Department of State, Bureau of Political Military Affairs, Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance, Enforcement Division (DTCC/END) explains that while conducting a review of the data posted on DEFCAD it found that the licensed firearm manufacturer might have released ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations)-controlled information without authorization and would thus be in violation.

The advertised purpose of the ATT was to require countries who become parties to adopt meaningful and hopefully effective national laws, based on agreed international standards, for regulating the export and import of conventional arms such as tanks, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, artillery, combatant naval vessels, and, presumably, small arms and light weapons.  Realistically, 99% of the energy and rhetoric concerning the treaty has always been about small arms, not larger weapons systems.  It’s also instructive that only about 25% of the world’s countries currently have even rudimentary regulations covering the topic.