News & Commentary

Photo by Kathryn Decker through Flickr Creative Commons.

When “eyes in the sky” are mentioned, we generally don’t give these spy satellites much thought because, after all, we can’t see them, they’re way up in space, and they’re not focused on us, right? Spies Much Closer to Us But the “friendly skies” a few hundred feet over us actually may not be so friendly after all. Although the feds readily tout our eye-in-the-sky satellite technology, it appears they’ve been a lot less forthcoming about a little air force of 50 to 100 low-flying surveillance planes the FBI has been using in ongoing criminal investigations. These airplanes, mostly conventional Cessna single-engine propeller craft, possess very unconventional, high-tech cameras and sometimes technology that can track thousands of cellphones, so-called Stingrays. These devices are under increasing scrutiny for their potential, and often actual, violations of Fourth Amendment privacy rights of cellphone users. Airborne Stingrays are Especially Dangerous 

In America, 11 million undocumented immigrants are living on the outskirts of society.  Of those 11 million, 95,000 live in Ohio. Many of these immigrant have been in the United States for more than 10 years and they have been waiting for a legal pathway to citizenship. On November 20, 2014, they got some good news. President Obama announced a series of executive actions to fix the nation’s broken immigration system. The executive actions included the expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and the introduction of a new program for parents called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents.