While exercising your right to protest is admirable, there are other more effective methods to consider. While the VIPR teams may be authorized and financed by the federal government, they are not law enforcement. As such, they require the active cooperation of your transit police, your municipal police, and your state police to carry out their warrant-less searches. (The FBI and federal marshals have better things to do, really.) Without the authority to stand around in a fake badge and remove naysayers from the premises, just how effective can VIPR be?

So talk to your city council representative. Be polite, presentable, and logical. If you're lucky, you might be able to make a presentation or get a sponsor on some legislation. If you can get even a small group of people together, your chances of success will improve. Your state or city may give you some additional tools with which to affect change: Initiative and Recall. Use them.

While the 4th amendment is nice, in principle, that's not what is going to get the attention of your city government. Focus on the fiscal impact of the TSA's presence. How much time does the MBTA police spend assisting the VIPR teams? Does the city need to hire any staff to support them? If just one staffer has to spend ten minutes of their day dealing with this stuff, the TSA's presence is not revenue-neutral. Even if you can't get these numbers, bring it up. It will get them thinking, if nothing else.

Focus also on the impact on commerce. Does the TSA delay trains, or make people late for work? Does the TSA significantly reduce the number of riders on the subway and put them on already-congested roads? Point out the potential for theft and harassment—there have been a number of news articles about this very topic. Once that is finished, all you need to do is prove that the TSA does not actually increase security. Bring in expert testimony, if you can get it.

Once you have proved that VIPR is unpopular, decreases city revenue, negatively impacts commercial interests, and is disruptive to the public order (i.e., "don't grope me"), you will have lots of momentum behind a city ordinance. The goal of the ordinance should be to (1) prevent any municipal law enforcement from cooperating with these searches, and (2) actively remove anyone conducting such searches from the transit system. In the absence of any overriding law, city ordinance prevails and—good news—it's an election year.

VIPR will, having been removed from the city, need to spend time, effort, and money passing overriding legislation. If you're lucky, they'll just go away and find someone else to tyrannize. Even if they don't go quietly, the REAL ID Act is a great example of what states can do to a federal program if they refuse to support it. So go ahead, take back your city.

Sure, but how many Wikipedia users—not editors or regular contributors, but users—actually check the revision logs or old versions of the page? Even writers who are using Wikipedia as a primary source don't do that much fact checking. Users don't always have the greatest attention span in the world, and burying stuff on another page is a sure-fire way to get people to ignore it. If you put revision information three or more clicks away, or sequester it in a registration-required (or paywall-required) page, how many people will follow it? News-gathering organizations have a reputation to maintain, and they have every incentive not to admit that they are (or ever were) wrong.

I think that wikis should have a visualization tool for paragraphs, highlighting text like a spell-checker in a word processor or a syntax-checker in an IDE. The visualization tool should represent how new, and how frequently-revised, a particular section of text is. This will allow casual readers to easily spot points of contention and text that may require further validation.

I seem to recall another civilization where news stories were subject to constant, behind-the-scenes revisions. I read about it in a book. One must always take care to interpret the past correctly, through the darkly-tinted lenses of our current social and political mindset. After all, it would simply be unsettling if there were anything at all in our history that happened to be politically insensitive or inconvenient for our current religious, economic, or secular leadership. Simply revising or "reinterpreting" key facts and events go a long way towards removing all of that troubling cognitive dissonance; such dissonance could cause people to question the way things are right now. Sadly, I can't really remember any more details about this civilization, because my e-books retailer erased every copy of it.

News via Wiki? I don't think so.

I have tried faxing via Google Voice over a POTS connection. I can connect to the remote fax machine, but it fails to send even one page. GV states in its FAQs that it cannot be used as a fax number. Either they are explicitly blocking it or (more likely) they are using an LPC/model-based speech codec like speex that simply eats the analog modulation for lunch. With the death of Gizmo5, it is now impossible to connect via SIP except via services that give you a PSTN connection and a phone number—and at that point, why use GV at all, since you're already paying someone else for a phone number? sipgate claims the ability to send faxes, but this is a function of sipgate and not Google, and I have not tried them at all.

Have you actually gotten fax over Google Voice to work?

I am profoundly disappointed by Google's profound lack of commitment to open standards (i.e. SIP).