Has search and advertising giant Google been tracking you just to sell you stuff -- or is it because the U.S. government asked it to? A congressional hearing later today may raise more questions than answers.

Oakland's police chief is making some dire claims about what his force will and will not respond to if layoffs go as planned.
Chief Anthony Batts listed exactly 44 situations that his officers will no longer respond to and they include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism. He says if you live and Oakland and one of the above happens to you, you need to let police know on-line

"A student has been saved from a vicious assault - not by the boys in blue but the men in black." -- I think the headline and subheadline for this article pretty much speaks for itself.....

Google and the Google-owned YouTube received more than 10,000 requests for user data from government agencies in the six months ending Dec. 31, 2009, according to newly released data.

"Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products," Google says on a new site that sheds more light onto government demands for user information and requests to take offensive material off the Web.

Several months ago, as a way to prevent the use of cellular phones in criminal activities, the government of Mexico started a program to require all phone owners to register cell phones in their own names. The registry associates each phone with the listed owner's Clave Unica de Registro de Poblacion (CURP) [CURP, in English], which is supposed to be a unique ID for every Mexican citizen.

The police have issued a warning for harassment against an airport worker after he allegedly took a photo of a female colleague as she went through a full-body scanner at Heathrow airport.

The incident, which occurred at terminal 5 on 10 March, is believed to be the first time an airport worker has been formally disciplined for misusing the scanners.

The ebb and flow of gas and electricity into your home contains surprisingly detailed information about your daily life. Energy usage data, measured moment by moment, allows the reconstruction of a household's activities: when people wake up, when they come home, when they go on vacation, and maybe even when they take a hot bath.

How can you tell that statism has perpetuated the society so thoroughly and fully. Look no further then this story here. A situation where a complete stranger can claim authority over someone and steal their child.

"Graham said the family left the hospital, ran some errands and got home at about 4:45 p.m., and the woman had followed them to their house, posing as a DCF worker, and convinced the baby's mother there was an ongoing investigation and that she needed to turn over her child."

Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the "Scarecrow Bandits" that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.

A woman found a loaded handgun in the airport bathroom after she went through the security checkpoint. Turns out a fed agent left it there.