Several episodes of Canal Livre featured Souza, a former police officer and politician, discovering the bodies of murdered drug lords in the jungles outside his home city of Manaus. You can see one such sequence in this clip, where Souza and his camera crew just happen to stumble on the still-smoking remains of a murdered man. Souza often ranted about problems with the police on his show, which is now off the air.

To prove the police's incompetence, Souza would air segments like these, saying that his TV crew was doing a better job finding dead bodies than the police.

Last year, his bodyguard was arrested for the murders of five men, whom he claimed Souza had ordered him to kill so that they could "discover" them on the show. Souza and his son were arrested, though Souza's status as a politician prevents him from being held in jail. Now the chief prosecutor of Amazonas, Brazil, has brought Souza up on drug trafficking charges too. It seems that he was also running a drug ring along with several other ex-police officers, and that the killings he ordered helped eliminate his competition in the world of drug selling, as well as on television.

This kind of scenario was predicted fairly accurately in the disburbing near-future movie Network, released in the 1970s, which is about a news show whose ratings go through the roof when their disillusioned anchor threatens to shoot himself on the air. To maintain their ratings, a craven TV executive (played by Faye Dunaway) arranges for the increasingly-deranged anchor to keep delivering his violent rants, until eventually he's murdered on air. At the same time, she uses her success with his show to jumpstart a reality program devoted to the activities of a terrorist group.

I can't wait for Survivor - the Wallace Souza Edition.

via ABC News

Things aren't all gloom and doom. In 2007, 26 percent more identity thieves were convicted in the United States than in 2006. That's a huge jump, but it still means that only 1,943 people were convicted of identity theft last year — that's out of about 1.6 million reports of identity theft on file with the Federal Trade Commission. Partly this is because the techniques that ID thieves use are always changing with changing tech. But it's also because so many of these crimes happen across national lines.

According to Threat Level's David Kravets, though, the US has a few ideas about how to combat ID theft. Some are obvious, like using social security cards less often. But others involve creating new mega-ID cards and a new law enforcement unit:

The 70-page document (.pdf) also includes 31 recommendations to combat identity theft. The report has a couple of interesting recommendations: the creation of a "National Identity Theft Law Enforcement Center" and providing victims of identity theft with a so-called passport "to prove they are who they say they are."

So basically if you're the victim of a ID thief, you'll have to carry around additional identity papers. Welcome to more airport line-waiting nightmares, to say the very least.

US Identity Theft Convictions Increase 26 Percent Feds Say [via Threat Level]