Although the National Transportation Safety Board has yet to release its report on the causes of last year's crash, today the pilot of the Cosco Busan, John Joseph Cota of Petaluma, was charged in federal court. The feds, it seems, found him in violation of two federal laws when he accidentally steered the container ship into the Bay Bridge on November 9 2007, which then released 53,000 gallons of oil into the bay. According......

Today a federal judge told the prosecutors to "re-craft its perjury case against Barry Bonds." The judge on the Bonds case, Susan Illston, claims that they "improperly lumped multiple alleged offenses into each of four counts of its indictment of the former Giants star." Whoops. Illston slammed the Bonds indictment, which was handed up last November, as "duplicitous." According to the Chron: By law, the government can only accuse a person of one crime......

Okay, here's an update on that lawsuit against AT&T and the Federal Government for illegally snooping on people's phone calls and e-mails. Basically, there are about seventeen similar lawsuits out there in the midst of the legal world and because they're all sort of similar-- whiny Al Queda supporters suing the telecoms and government for doing something unconstitutional, they've been mashed together into one big lawsuit sandwich. That sandwich will be heard in San Francisco's very own Federal Court by one U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker. The reasoning is because out of all the various suits out there, the AT&T one is the most advanced. Bully to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation and how awesome would it be if they started their own University just so people could say they go to EFF U?) and the ACLU for being on the ball. ...

There actually is a local component to this whole NSA wiretapping/eavesdropping scandal, one that is about to make the scandal more scandal-y. It involves AT&T and the claims of former AT&T technician Mark Klein that sometime in 2002, AT&T allowed the U.S. Government to build a secret room in their Folsom Street office for the express purpose of eavesdropping not just on phones, but the internet too. And yes, whenever we read about this, we picture guys in black suits, black ties, and black shades running around the AT&T offices led by a mysterious figure smoking a cigarette. ...