The latest round of negotiations over the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA — a secret treaty that contains provisions requiring nations to wiretap the Internet, force ISPs to spy on users, search laptops at the border, and disconnect whole households from the net on the basis of mere accusation of copyright infringement) is just kicking off in Mexico, and activists from around Mexico and the world have converged on the meeting to demand transparent, public negotiations of this critical treaty.

The Supreme Court may have changed the landscape of campaign spending today: in issuing its decision on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, it announced that corporations and unions can now spend money directly in support of candidates.

Justice Kennedy, in the majority opinion, reasoned that the government can’t discriminate against speakers based on their corporate identities, and that “all speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech, and the First Amendment protects the resulting speech.”

This basically eliminates a middleman: before today, corporations and unions had to set up PACs (political action committees), filed separately with the IRS, that would receive donations. And they did. Corporations and unions spend millions of dollars on elections. Now, however, the accounting firewall is gone, and Wal-Mart or the Service Employees International Union, for instance, can spend their corporate money directly on candidates.

Chris Good writing in The Atlantic

Convicted sex workers, many of whom are victims of human trafficking, must now register as sex offenders in Louisiana.

“What’s that mean for them? There’s a stamp printed on their driver’s licenses, labeling them as sex offenders. They can’t get food stamps or public assistance, much less jobs, and if there’s a hurricane they need to go to special shelters reserved for sex offenders. They can’t even dress up for Mardi Gras!” - from TresSugar

Also see: Not for Sale Campaign

The ten largest defense contractors in the nation spent more than $27 million lobbying the federal government in the last quarter of 2009, according to a review of recently-filed lobbying records.

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that Army wives report a lot of stress when their husbands are sent to Afghanistan and Iraq. And the longer the deployment, the more likely the wife is to experience depression, anxiety, trouble sleeping and other mental health problems.

RECAP is a free extension for Firefox that improves the experience of using PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts.

RECAP is an extension (or “add on”) for the Firefox web browser that improves the PACER experience while helping PACER users build a free and open repository of public court records. RECAP users automatically donate the documents they purchase from PACER into a public repository hosted by the Internet Archive. And RECAP saves users money by alerting them when a document they are searching for is already available from this repository. RECAP also makes other enhancements to the PACER experience, including more user-friendly file names.

RECAP is a project of the Center for Information Technology Policyat Princeton University. It is one of several projects that harness the power of the web to increase government transparency.

A little while ago, I recommended Backblaze for online backup. [Of course I always recommend the Time Capsule for on-site backup.] I found JungleDisk a little junky since Rackspace took it over, Mozy unreliable, and Carbonite a little too advertise-on-Limbaugh-y.

Backblaze offers a simple System Preferences pane for backup and Time Machine-like ease-of-use. Plus, it’s only $5/month for unlimited backup.

Check out the Backblaze Blog for how they deploy 67 terabytes for less than $8,000 (and how you can build your own).

Backblaze hosts in the 365 Main datacenter shared with Sun, Cnet, and Esurance with 24x7 staff, biometric security, diesel and induction power redundancy, 25 independent telecom providers, and a 24” raised floor with seismic pedestals.

Find out more on their blog.

Jimmy is a 26 year old chimpanzee who has spent several years alone in a cage, where he’s on exhibit at a zoo in Niterói, Brazil, just outside of Rio de Janeiro. Just last week, animal protection groups filed a motion to have Jimmy released on grounds of Habeas Corpus, arguing that he is being denied his rights to freedom of movement and to a decent life, in Rio’s Criminal Court.

The New Jersey Assembly has approved a bill allowing chronically ill patients access to medical marijuana. The compromise bill now heads to the Senate, which had approved a less restrictive version.

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild.