Alex Reid

Despite numerous requests for a translator, the attending RCMP officers decided electrocuting someone was a better idea.

The Toronto Star is hosting the video here.

EBay Inc was one of only eight companies that lobbied the CIA in the past year according a publicly available US lobbying disclosure list.

While eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said that listing was an error, he admits that the company did meet with CIA officers in late 2006 to discuss amendments to the 1994 US Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), a law that requires Internet phone companies to ensure that they can accommodate wiretaps.

EBay owns the Internet phone company Skype, which holds 240 million users.

In 2004, the US Department of Justice, FBI and the DEA petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with implementing CALEA to expand the law to VoIP providers. The FCC agreed in August 2005 and since then VoIP providers have been unsure how to overcome the technological obstacle to retool their programming code to allow law enforcement agencies to listen in on calls since the peer to peer service does not have any any centralized method to track calls.

No surprise that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) are critics to the expansion of this law, arguing that not only will the law impede on privacy, but it will stifle the advancement of the Internet if it has to standardize its programming so that law enforcement agencies can listen in on calls.

EBay also lobbied the White House, FBI, Federal Communications Commission, IRS and the Departments of Commerce, Justice, Defense, State and Treasury regarding a wide range of pressing issues facing the Internet such as patent reform, copyright enforcement, data security, identity theft prevention, child predator, the Internet tax exemption and spectrum auctions. The company spent $890,000 in the last six months of 2006 and $985,000 lobbying in the first half of 2007.