US citizens: call on your senators to protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

When thug Franklin Foulks arrested black teenager Jamal Rutledge, then had a heart attack, Rutledge demonstrated a spark of goodness and saved Foulks' life.

There is no indication that Foulks was acting thuggishly at that time. Jamal Rutledge may indeed have committed burglary; his arrest may have been entirely proper. I call Foulks a thug because he works for a thug department. A priori, I expect that if he had seen another thug shoot Rutledge for no reason and make false charges, he would have lied in support of the false charges. This is what makes the story ironic.

It is possible Foulks is an exception. I hope so, but exceptions are unusual.

Americans: check your own state for regressive tax policies. Do the wealthy pay a lower state tax rate than the poor?

Some conclusions that follow from these facts.

Obama's War on Crackers goes to the point where you could be imprisoned simply for clicking on a link — or talking with people who did.

Doing anything on a computer that the owner would not like would be a crime.

Please don't use the word "hackers" to refer to people who really do break security, or people accused of doing so. That's unfair to us hackers, who enjoy playful cleverness.

The CFAA is already too broad in its definition of crime, as we saw when it was used against Aaron Swartz and drove him to suicide. It needs to be changed in the other direction.

It would be a strategic error to limit ourselves to criticizing these changes for the worse. Eventually they would "compromise" with us, "meet us half way", by making only part of their changes for the worse, and they would have silenced our demands.

What we must do now is reiterate the demand to correct what is already wrong with the CFAA, so that the "compromise" is to do nothing and we do not drop our demands to correct the existing injustice.

US companies are coercing employees into "wellness programs".

If these "wellness programs" involve using wearable surveillance devices, they will mean total surveillance. Any activity that pressures people to use them is therefore unjust.