Two U.S. air marshals who arrested the wife of a Brazilian judge on a flight to Rio de Janeiro -- and were themselves arrested and had their passports confiscated by Brazilian authorities -- fled the country using alternate travel documents rather than face what they believed to be trumped-up charges, sources said.

"The documents show that the DHS established a unit called the Social Network Monitoring Center (SNMC) last year to scour social sites for signs of potential security threats during the presidential inauguration.

The sites targeted by the SNMC included predictable ones such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, in addition to more demographically focused sites such as MiGente and BlackPlanet."

AP) - A South Carolina jail was sued Wednesday over its policy barring inmates from having any reading materials except the Bible.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the policy on behalf of Prison Legal News, a monthly journal on prison law. The 16-page complaint says officials at the Berkeley County jail in Moncks Corner, about 100 miles southeast of Columbia, are violating several of the magazine's and inmates' constitutional rights including free speech, freedom of religion and right to due process.

US intelligence agencies complain the country’s “Creation and Internet Law” – Hadopi – will only encourage Internet users to arm themselves with same encryption tools used by criminal networks, making their job of detecting threats and illegal activity that much harder.

Another example of a government employee getting special treatment. Try driving through the grass of your local park and running over someone and see what happens. There is no justice for the "citizens" of our society, especially the homeless, when it comes to the United States legal system.

I actually agree with the fire department letting the house burn down.

The city will change the lettering on every single street sign - at an estimated cost of about $27.5 million - because the feds don't like the font.

Sometimes government programs have good intentions and sometimes not. And sometimes they try shit just to see what happens.

And while the history of governments doing grossly misguided things is too long and depressing to recount here, these five programs backfired in ways that could impress even the most pessimistic among us:

"Obama is arguing the executive has the power to execute American citizens without a trial, without even so much as an airing of the charges against them, and that it can do so in complete secrecy..."

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside FBI offices in Minneapolis and Chicago on Monday, bearing signs and shouting chants condemning the agency's recent searches of homes and offices of anti-war activists in both cities.