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Wallace took cellphone pictures and video after the shooting stopped, but he said Mesquite police confiscated the phone and deleted the video and pictures. The phone was returned four days later, he said.

The law states that police need a court order to confiscate a camera unless it was used in a commission of a crime. The only exception is if there are exigent circumstances, such as a strong belief that the witness will destroy the photos, therefore destroying evidence. Under no circumstances do police have the right to delete footage.

You may remember a high-profile, landmark ruling last year in Massachusetts, where charges against Simon Glik -- arrested for violating a state law that said it's "wiretapping" to record a police officer in public without his permission -- weren't just dropped, but the arrest was found to be both a First and Fourth Amendment violation. In the end, Boston was forced to pay Glik $170,000 for violating his civil rights. You would think that story would spread across Massachusetts pretty quickly and law enforcement officials and local district attorneys would recognize that filing similar charges would be a certified bad idea. Not so, apparently, in the town of Shrewsbury. Irving J. Espinosa-Rodrigue was apparently arrested and charged under the very same statute after having a passenger in his car videotape a traffic stop for speeding, and then posting the video on YouTube. Once again, the "issue" is that Massachusetts is a "two-party consent" state, whereby an audio recording can't be done without first notifying the person being recorded, or its deemed a "wiretap." This interpretation, especially when dealing with cops in public, is flat-out ridiculous and unconstitutional, as the Glik ruling showed.

Court documents have revealed how information supplied by New Zealand’s Organised and Financial Crime Agency led to Kim Dotcom and his associates being illegally monitored by GCSB, the Kiwi spy agency comparable to the United States’ CIA. Today a High Court judge expressed concern at the situation, with Dotcom’ legal team calling for an independent inquiry into the fiasco. Meanwhile, pressure continues to mount on Prime Minister John Key as it’s revealed the government issued an information suppression order.

According to court documents, GCSB checked with OFCANZ that both Dotcom and der Kolk were indeed foreign nationals. OFCANZ said they were, but in fact neither should have been spied on by GCSB. The monitoring went ahead anyway. In the High Court today, Justice Helen Winkelmann asked lawyers how it could be possible that GCSB hadn’t known about Dotcom’s New Zealand residency.

During an earlier hearing, Detective Inspector Grant Wormald of OFCANZ said that apart from surveillance carried out by the police, no other surveillance had been carried out against Dotcom. But with the revelation that GCSB had indeed been monitoring the Megaupload founder at the behest of OFCANZ, questions are now being raised about this apparent inconsistency, not least since Wormald previously acknowledged that a secret government unit had been involved in a pre-raid planning meeting in January.

Further evidence of overeager and illegal police work emerged Thursday in New Zealand as Inspector General of Security and Intelligence Paul Neazor released a report on the illegal bugging of Kim Dotcom and Megaupload programmer Bram van der Kolk. Two GCSB officers were present at a police station nearby Dotcom’s mansion as the raid took place.

Police weighed several options for the raid named “Operation Debut,” undertaken at the behest of US authorities, and sought to take Dotcom and associates with the “greatest element of surprise” and to minimise any delays the in executing the search and seizure operation should the German file sharing tycoon’s staff be uncooperative or even resist officers on arrival.

The police planners also noted that “Dotcom will use violence against person’s [sic] and that he has several staff members who are willing to use violence at Dotcom’s bidding” after a U.S. cameraman, Jess Bushyhead, reported the Megaupload founder for assaulting him with his stomach after a dispute. Based on Dotcom’s license plates such as MAFIA, POLICE, STONED, GUILTY, and HACKER, police said this indicates the German “likes to think of himself as a gangster” and is “described as arrogant, flamboyant and having disregard for law enforcement.” However, the documents show that Dotcom had only been caught violating the speed limit in New Zealand. The request for assistance from the STG notes that the US investigation against Mega Media Group and Dotcom was started in March 2010 by prosecutors and the FBI. According to the documents, US prosecutors and FBI “discovered that the Mega Media Group had engaged in and facilitated criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale around the world.” FBI in turn contacted NZ Police in “early 2011," requesting assistance with the Mega Media Group investigation as Dotcom had moved to New Zealand at the time.

All telecommunications operators, sales outlets and distributors are obliged to register their business at local authorities. Meanwhile, all locations serving telephone services and Internet shall be equipped with closed circuit television camera and shall store footage data of users for at least 03 months. Telephone service corporation owners along public roads shall record National Identity Cards of any subscriber.

In order to prevent copyright monopoly violations from happening in such channels, the only means possible is to wiretap all private digital communications to discover when copyrighted works are being communicated. As a side effect, you would eliminate private communications as a concept. There is no way to sort communications into legal and illegal without breaching the postal secret – the activity of sorting requires observation.

Any digital, private communications channel can be used for private protected correspondence, or to transfer works that are under copyright monopoly. In order to prevent copyright monopoly violations from happening in such channels, the only means possible is to wiretap all private digital communications to discover when copyrighted works are being communicated. As a side effect, you would eliminate private communications as a concept. There is no way to sort communications into legal and illegal without breaching the postal secret – the activity of sorting requires observation.

"I don't want to pre-empt the work of journalists," he said, "but there's no question the US is engaged in economic spying. If there's information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests (not the national security) of the United States, they'll go after that information."

While evidence shows the NSA has spied on Brazil's Petrobras oil company, the US government has never been conclusively linked to the surveillance or theft of trade secrets on an international stage. If true, the revelations would have a grave diplomatic impact, particularly the government attempts to regain the trust of allied nations.

"deny, disrupt, degrade and deceive" by any means possible.

According to reports in Der Spiegel last year, British intelligence has tapped the reservations systems of over 350 top hotels around the world for the past three years to set up Royal Concierge. It was used to spy on trade delegations, foreign diplomats, and other targets with a taste for the high life.

A PowerPoint presentation from 2010 states that JTRIG activities account for five per cent of GCHQ's operations budget and uses a variety of techniques. These include "call bombing" to drown out a target's ability to receive messages, attacking targets in hotels, Psyops (psychological operations) against individuals, and going all the way up to disrupting a country's critical infrastructure.

Because of section 1201 of the DMCA, the "anti-circumvention" provision, companies have been abusing copyright law to block all sorts of actions that are totally unrelated to copyright. That's because 1201 makes it illegal to circumvent basically any "technological protection measures." The intent of the copyright maximalists was to use this section to stop people from breaking DRM. However, other companies soon distorted the language to argue that it could be used to block certain actions totally unrelated to copyright law -- such as unlocking garage doors, ink jet cartridges, gaming accessories... and phones

“The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. 

Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends. The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes:

Earlier Edward Snowden leaks had revealed that the NSA created a flawed random number generation system (Dual_EC_DRBG), Dual Elliptic Curve, which RSA used in its Bsafe security tool and now Snowden has revealed that RSA received $10 million from NSA for keeping Encryption Weak. So, anyone who knows the right numbers used in Random number generator program, can decipher the resulting cryptotext easily.