Two years ago, the UK dismantled their national ID scheme and shredded their National Identity Registry in response to great public outcry over the privacy-invasive program. Unfortunately privacy protections have been less rosy elsewhere. In Argentina, the national ID fight was lost some time ago. A law enacted during the military dictatorship forced all individuals to obtain a government-mandated ID.

Now, they are in the process of enhancing its mandatory National Registry of Persons (RENAPER) with biometric data such as fingerprints and digitized faces. The government plans to repurpose this database in order to facilitate "easyaccess" to law enforcement by merging this data into a new, security-focused integrated system. This raises the specter of mass surveillance, as Argentinean law enforcement will have access to mass repositories of citizen information and be able to leverage existing facial recognition and fingerprint matching technologies in order to identify any citizen anywhere.

- From the EFF's must read article: Biometrics in Argentina: Mass Surveillance as a State Policy

The above passage was written in early 2012, but I had never taken the time to look into Argentina's burgeoning and extremely creepy biometric database until now. It takes on increased importance to Americans now that Apple has rolled out its iPhone 5NsA.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has a division for particularly difficult missions. Called "Tailored Access Operations" (TAO), this department devises special methods for special targets.

That category includes surveillance of neighboring Mexico, and in May 2010, the division reported its mission accomplished. A report classified as "top secret" said: "TAO successfully exploited a key mail server in the Mexican Presidencia domain within the Mexican Presidential network to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account."

According to the NSA, this email domain was also used by cabinet members, and contained "diplomatic, economic and leadership communications which continue to provide insight into Mexico's political system and internal stability." The president's office, the NSA reported, was now "a lucrative source."

© M.Swiet Productions/Getty

Landmark island-wide 'Right to Know' bill passes council, moves on to Mayor's desk.

Since the 1990s, there's been trouble in Paradise. Biotech companies - including Monsanto, Dow, and Syngenta - have used the fragile Hawaiian ecosystem on the island of Kaua'i to test and refine their pesticides, herbicides, and other agrichemical products. Some of these testing fields, 15,000 acres in total, are near schools, homes, hospitals and waterways, putting many residents on the tiny island at risk of exposure.

Following the landmark passage of a bill by the Kaua'i County Council this week, Kaua'i residents are one step closer to greater peace of mind. A new law passed Wednesday would require the largest biotech companies to report and publicly disclose the pesticides and genetically engineered crops used on the island, and would prohibit all pesticide use near schools, medical facilities, parks and waterways that flow into the ocean. Kaua'i County would also be required to study and report on the environmental and health impacts of pesticides and GE crops.

Measure 2491, which passed the Council in a 6-1 vote, and now must be signed by Kaua'i's mayor, Bernard Carvahlo, is seen as an enormous victory for anti-GMO activists and Hawaii residents alike.

So much attention concerning the intelligence community lately has been focused on the NSA. There has been a bit of looking at the FBI as well, but for the most part the CIA has been left untouched -- even though when the Washington Post released details of the US's black budget (thanks to Ed Snowden), it surprised many people to discover that the CIA still has a significantly larger budget than the NSA.

Late last week, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer had a fantastic article revealing some details of a still-classified report put together by the Senate Intelligence Committee which apparently rips the CIA to shreds over its torture program, both in how ineffective the program was, but also in how the CIA tried to avoid any real oversight from Congress.

At its core is a bitter disagreement over an apparently devastating, and still secret, report by the Senate Intelligence Committee documenting in detail how the C.I.A.'s brutalization of terror suspects during the Bush years was unnecessary, ineffective, and deceptively sold to Congress, the White House, the Justice Department, and the public. The report threatens to definitively refute former C.I.A. personnel who have defended the program's integrity. But so far, to the consternation of several members of the Intelligence Committee, the Obama Administration, like Bush's before it, is keeping the damning details from public view.

The CIA, apparently, has been "defiant and defensive" in response to the massive report (over 6,000 pages, and which apparently cost $40 million to produce). CIA boss John Brennan has apparently been especially aggressive in trying to challenge the report and in blocking it from being declassified.

Fox News employees set up a series of dummy accounts to rebut critical blog posts, according to a new book.

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes in his forthcoming book Murdoch's World that the network's public relations staffers set up "sock puppet" accounts to fill comments sections of "negative or even neutral" blog posts in the mid-to-late '00s with "pro-Fox rants."

The reporter says Fox employees set up wireless broadband connections that couldn't be traced to back to the network to help cover their tracks, and one employee used an AOL dial-up connection.

It's time to swat bugs at Healthcare.gov, administration officials said Sunday.

President Obama plans to address the issue of the sign-up website's broken functionality tomorrow in a Rose Garden event, UPI reported Sunday.

A senior Israeli minister has come to enlist the Canadian government in efforts to persuade the world to keep up pressure on Iran until it gives in - thoroughly - on its nuclear program.

Yuval Steinitz, Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs, was briefed Friday by British and other officials now in nuclear talks with Iran. He flew to Canada for meetings Monday with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, and heads to Washington Tuesday.

Amid all the other Mideast issues, there's little doubt what tops Israel's agenda: pushing an uncompromising stance on nuclear talks with Iran.

"The greater the pressure, the greater the chances for diplomacy to succeed," Mr. Steinitz said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. "It would be unwise, to say the least, to ease the pressure on Iran before you get a final and satisfactory solution to the problem."

The election of centrist Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, who pledges to settle the nuclear issue, has led some to express hope for a deal with the United States and other Western countries that believe Tehran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon has pleaded with and complained to the U.S. Justice Department but cannot convince the government to end its criminal probe of his bank because prosecutors are not yet certain of their findings, people familiar with the matter said.

Dimon has negotiated a tentative $13-billion deal to settle many of the U.S. investigations into mortgage bonds that JPMorgan - and the banks it bought during the financial crisis - sold to investors.

But the criminal investigation proved to be a sticking point during negotiations, the sources said, and Dimon's inability to win this point underscores the breadth of the problems his bank faces even after it resolves these mortgage suits.

The criminal probe relates to whether JPMorgan misrepresented the quality of the mortgages it was packaging into bonds and selling to investors.

If the Supreme Court chooses to erase our remaining post-Watergate campaign finance reforms, Richard Nixon's scandalous reign may come to seem - thanks to growing inequality - mere kid's play.

The U.S. Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments in a case that could end up giving America's wealthy a perpetual green light to contribute as much as they want directly to politicians and political parties.

Credit Shaun McCutcheon, an electrical company CEO from Alabama, for starting the ball on this case rolling. In the 2012 election cycle, McCutcheon contributed heavily to conservative candidates and Republican Party committees. But the experience left the mega millionaire feeling terribly aggrieved.

Federal campaign finance reform legislation enacted four decades ago in the wake of the Watergate scandal limits how much individuals can give directly to candidates and political parties. In 2012, McCutcheon ran up against those limits, then sitting at about $46,000 for candidates and $70,000 for party committees.

The American right obsesses over abortion and birth control, not helping people. It's different around the globe

Last week, the nation's capital was host to Value Voters 2013 Summit, a three-day political conference for predominantly religious conservatives. Among the smattering of social and economic issues at hand, the overall tenor of the Summit focused on eliminating Obamacare, expanding the tangible presence of Christianity through the public arena and military and preventing the proliferation of easily available birth control and abortion. In speeches, lunches and breakout sessions, American's Christian Right worked out strategies to bring the values of the federal government in line with their preferred Christian ethical dictates, using democracy as their chief tool.

It isn't unusual for Christians living in democracies to use the vote to express their ethics, and to shape government to do the same. That the moral and ethical preferences of a given society should inform government is a foundational principle of democracy, after all. And American values voters are far from the first Christians to undertake the project of bringing their government's policies in line with Christian ethics: European Christian parties have aimed to do the same for decades. But between American Christian voters and their European counterparts, a curious departure opens up: while European Christians generally see the anti-poverty mission of Christianity as worthy of political action, the American Christian Right inexplicably cordons off economics from the realm of Christian influence.

By all means, the American Christian Right is willing to leverage government authority to carry out a variety of Christian ethical projects, especially within the arena of family life. Michele Bachmann would make abortion illegal, and Rick Santorum has stated on multiple occasions that he supports laws against homosexual intercourse. But Christian politicians in the United States curtail their interest in making the gospel actionable when it comes to welfare. While the government should see to the moral uprightness of marriage, sex and family, the Value Voters 2013 Summit was notably bereft of talks on living wages, labor rights or basic incomes.