Diaries

Canada’s National Bird Search

They don’t have one. Who’d a thunk it, eh? I’ve lived a stone’s throw away from the border for most of my life and never knew. But that’s going to change soon. The Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Canadian Geographic is conducting a poll for the National Bird Project. They hope Canada will have an official bird by 2017, the country's sesquicentennial.

Justice Department Spies on Millions of Cars

From a Wall Street Journal News Alert this evening:

The Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists, according to current and former officials and government documents.

The primary goal of the license-plate tracking program, run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, is to seize cars, cash and other assets to combat drug trafficking, according to one government document. But the database's use has expanded to hunt for vehicles associated with numerous other potential crimes, from kidnappings to killings to rapes, say people familiar with the matter.

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