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Early last week Hannaford Bros. Corp., which operates close to 300 supermarkets in New England and Florida, announced that cyber-thieves had compromised more than four million of its customers’ credit and debit card numbers over a four-month period beginning last December.... Read more

EVENT CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER

SOUTH ROYALTON & BURLINGTON — Attorney Leonard Weinglass, perhaps the country’s foremost champion of left-wing defendants, is scheduled to speak in Vermont next week on a little-known case that, he says, raises big issues about the U.S. criminal-justice system.... Read more

VERMONT — Partly cloudy with a chance of Orwell? Ready.gov, an online safety database, was created in 2003 in conjunction with the federal Department of Homeland Security. Now, DHS is paying a Pennsylvania ad firm to pitch “pre-written” winter-weather-preparedness articles to the national press — including Seven Days and other Vermont newspapers.... Read more

Cuffed and Stuffed
I was coming back from Canada earlier this month after a shopping trip. When we got to the border, there were four of us in the car — me, my wife, her neighbor and her daughter. We handed them our papers, passports and such. Then the officer said to me, “Can I see your hands please.” I showed him my hands, and he asked me to step out of the car. Of course, I did.... Read more

Acuriously intense blanket of fog made nearly the whole journey from Montréal to the Highgate Springs border entrance a hyper-vigilant, steering-wheel-clenching affair. I approached the U.S. Customs station at 1 in the morning on November 21 with relief, if only because it was the first truly well-lit area I’d seen for 40 miles. Winding around the pylons and creeping up to the single open checkpoint lane, I saw that not a single car was ahead of me.... Read more

No one entering the United States illegally is ever happy to see George Woodward. But if you’re going to get caught by a U.S. Border Patrol agent, he seems as decent as they come. The 50-year-old supervisory agent cut his teeth on the job, as all Border Patrol agents do, in the southwestern United States.... Read more

With all the border bashing going on in Vermont lately, one might think there isn’t a single soul in the Green Mountains with something nice to say about Customs officials. Not so fast. One group of men and women — who probably cross the border more times in a year than most Vermonters do in their entire lives — say things are looking up. Who are these border groupies? Truckers!... Read more

SOUTH BURLINGTON — If terrorists were to attack South Burlington, would neighbors bat an eye?

Apparently not. For 18 hours last weekend, the Vermont Air National Guard conducted military exercises at its South Burlington headquarters, which abuts the Burlington International Airport. The semi-covert ops were conducted as part of a simulated terrorist attack.... Read more

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 in part to foster better communication between states and the federal government in the wake of 9/11. Four years later, Vermonter Kerry Sleeper, a high-ranking state liaison to the federal government on national security matters, went public in a Washington Post story suggesting DHS doesn’t understand what he would later call the “nuances” of state and local agencies.... Read more

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When members of Congress approved the National Defense Authorization Act last October, most of them had no idea that they were fundamentally altering the balance of power between the federal and state governments that’s existed for more than 200 years. Buried within the $538 billion military spending bill was a rider making it easier for the president to declare martial law and assume command of the National Guard, with or without a governor’s consent.... Read more