Does cellphone-sweeping ‘Stingray’ go too far?

The federal gov’t already broke its medical marijuana promise

Magic mushrooms next to be decriminalized in California?

FBI receives record number of background check requests for guns on Black Friday

UK politician calls for legalization of marijuana, admits to drinking cannabis tea

LA Times: How your data are shared and sold could be California’s marquee ballot battle in 2018

Activist Post: Macy’s parade security used to promote Surveillance State

The curious case of the murdered Baltimore officer gets even curiouser

Remembering the legacy of communism: Birthday of the bloodbath

• All that data is worth a fortune, of course it will be sold: Coalition could allow firms to buy access to facial recognition data
• Surrender: We’ve lost our privacy in an information swamp: “The rule: What had seemed private or sure to be forgotten is public and prone to be surfaced eventually. And this information speaks volumes — and adds up to more than the evident sum of its parts.Facebook knows so much about its users, from so many secret sources of information, that, as Kashmir Hill has been reporting at Gizmodo, it’s suggested to users as “people you may know” one-night stands, a child to a sperm donor, a psychiatrist’s patients to each other, and on and on. Who knows what the other keepers of our secrets — the ones who aren’t trying to sell us on their services — are doing with them in this furiously evolving internet of things that encompasses the Amazon Echo in your house, drones that fly in swarms and trillions of connected sensors linking the physical and virtual worlds?”
• Putin signs anti-foreign media law after RT forced to register as a foreign agent.  Did the BBC register too?
• Apple vs. FBI: 2 year old encryption debate heats up again
• Are Robots Better Pilots?
• Why you may want to swap your benzos for medical cannabis
• Will meth cause the next American drug crisis?
• Scientists have built a “hallucination machine” for drug-free brain trips