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Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

Voices of Resistance from Occupied London | There is nothing comparable at all in the U.S. to the apparatus of surveillance that exists in London. Even CCTV cameras are only recently becoming an issue in the U.S. Total surveillance of down town areas of American cities is something I wrote about in the early nineties but only applied to tiny areas, a few acres in down town Los Angeles for example. If Giuliani does become president we will get closer to the idea of having total surveillance and control in the city centre but London is at least one if not two generations ahead of the United States.

A key portion of the Patriot Act is unconstitutional and violates Americans' free speech rights, a federal judge said Thursday in a case that could represent a bitter setback for the Bush administration's attempts to expand its surveillance powers.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the section of the Patriot Act that permits the FBI to send Internet service providers secret demands, called national security letters, for customer information violates the First Amendment and unreasonably curbs the authority of the judiciary.

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

Arizona became the third state last week to volunteer for a Homeland Security Department program in which it will develop a hybrid identification card that combines a state driver’s license with a U.S. border-crossing card.

DHS and state officials announced an agreement to partner in development of the “enhanced” driver’s license that is expected to meet the department’s Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative requirements as well as align with future driver’s license requirements of the Real ID Act, DHS said in a news release.

“Arizona’s new driver’s license is poised to be one of the nation’s first to comply with Real ID requirements,” the news release said.

U.S. government silences "We Will Not Be Silent" t-shirt

The New York Civil Liberties Union and the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a federal civil rights lawsuit charging that a Transportation Security Administration official and JetBlue Airways illegally discriminated against an American resident based solely on the Arabic message on his t-shirt and his ethnicity.

(CNN) -- The Department of Homeland Security insists the Real ID Act is an essential tool to fight the war on terror, but critics say it's an overly intrusive measure that raises privacy concerns.

The actaims to weave driver's licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system. States must begin issuing new federal licenses by May 11, 2008, unless they receive an extension. The cards would be mandatory for all "federal purposes." People in states that don't comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.

The following provides requirements of the act, signed in 2005:

Who must get one?