The Village of Schaumburg has announced that it has come up with a plan to equip all of their police squad cars and motorcycles with cameras. The cost will be $334,620. The funding source will be grants from various sources. There will be no additional cost to the Village. The Village has hired CVS Office Technologies to provide 40 in camera systems for the Department’s police cars and motorcycles. The cameras will be able to capture events that happen inside the vehicles and outside the vehicles. The videos can be used in court to prosecute cases or to defend police officers from claims of excessive force or improper behavior. According to the Schaumburg Police, even though the cameras can be used in prosecutions, they believe that the evidence captured by cameras benefits police officers 90% of the time. Most of the criminal cases that will involve video evidence will be DUI cases. It sounds like this will be a work-in-progress for the village. Police officers will have the abilit...

The United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a lawsuit brought by lawyers, journalists and civil rights organizations challenging the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allows for the government to eavesdrop on telephone and email communications between people in the United states and foreign countries without a warrant.  The plaintiffs claim that the fear that they may be intercepted causes them to adopt costly measures to avoid having their communications intercepted.  The Supreme Court is not considering the legality of this law. Rather, they are considering whether the plaintiff’s in this case have the legal standing to even bring such a lawsuit.  The warrant-less wiretapping program was put into effect by President Bush after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 without any Congressional authority. The program ended in 2007 but was reinstated by Congress in 2008.  The government is claiming that the plaintiffs cannot show that the...