You may remember a few months back when Aaron Barr, CEO of computer security firm HBGary, tried to finger some of the key members of hacker collective Anonymous and got burned. Colbert lays out the context for that little drama as being part of a coverup by Bank of America involving the Justice Department and Wikileaks while at the same time lampooning everyone like a ninja. Check out the video and see for yourself.
[UPDATE]
On a related note, members of Anonymous have just claimed responsibility for taking down more than 40 underground childpr0n websites and releasing over 1500 user names to the public. Is Anonymous branching out in their mission or its it just a few members deciding to take the Robin Hood act to the next level?
Ministers have bowed to pressure to allow the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for research.
Internet censorship is growing worldwide, with 26 out of 40 countries blocking or filtering political or social content, a study reported Friday.
Yet the antidiscrimination measure has been held up because Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, has placed a hold on the bill. He should let the Senate get on with passing the bill, whose importance will only grow as technology evolves.
For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy. 
If EFCA is defeated, it will carry little or no political cost, largely because America’s corporatocracy has done a bang-up job of framing the debate. A coalition of big business groups conducted a wildly misleading poll, one that gave respondents the (false) idea that the bill will diminish rather than protect workers’ rights—specifically, their right to a fair vote about whether to unionize. They’ve taken that spin and synchronized it across the whole of the conservative communications infrastructure—from business-funded think tanks to right-wing blogs, to the Wall Street Journal editorial page to lawmakers walking the halls of Congress.
