Big Brother

Remember the missing emails of former IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner? You remember Lois.

Forget (for the moment) federal government spying on your emails, text messages, phone calls, internet">Internet searches, postal mail, banking activity, driving habits and more.  One of the biggest growth areas for the surveillance state is in old-fashioned

Some Department of Homeland Security personnel are given federal credit cards. They are supposed to use those credit cards for work purposes. But it turns out they are also using them to buy a lot of pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks:

The National Security Agency has been called out more than once for its email surveillance program. Critics have charged that there is no way the NSA can separate domestic emails from foreign emails. And the critics have been proven right:

We've written before about the widespread use of military equipment by local police departments under the Department of Defense's 1033 Program. With more and more military hardware showing up in communities large and small (sometimes very small), some folks have decided to find out just what their local police have acquired.

And it wants phone makers to make it as easy as possible for the agency to do so:

And while we're on the topic of the rapid decline of public education, consider this story out of Alabama:

This time, it's not related to Lois Lerner, but the Internal Revenue Service, facing a lawsuit from NetJets over a tax bill, is accused of "losing" the emails and other data relevant to the case:

The new iPhone has several new features that have fans raving. But one feature has the government crying foul about Apple's new phone and one in the works from google">Google, too: