A new study finds that saying that you represent a group of active campaign donors is five times as likely to result in a meeting with a member of congress or their chief of staff than if you say you are representing a group of interested ‘local constituents’. While the researchers were not surprised by the difference, they did not expect it to be so large.
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Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald writing at The Intercept reveal (based on documents provided by Edward Snowden) the latest criminal scheme by the NSA and GCHQ called the TURBINE initiative that involves infecting millions of computers worldwide with malware.
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Over at the New Yorker, Amy Davidson fills us in on the details of the fight between Senate Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein and CIA director John Brennan. It shows how the CIA infiltrated the computers of the intelligence committee staffers and messed around with their documents.
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One of the recurrent themes of politics that would be amusing if it were not infuriating is how politicians are quite complacent about the rights of ordinary citizens being violated by the government but get enraged when they discover that they themselves are targets of those same abuses.
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I am not sure how many people are familiar with this online show on the comedy website Funny or Die, where Zach Galifianakis plays a boorish and ignorant host who interviews celebrities and both host and guest are mutually passive-aggressive and backhanded in their insults, and the cringe-worthy exchanges are interspersed with awkward moments of silence.
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In a single cartoon, Tom Tomorrow skewers US hypocrisy on Ukraine, the eternal bloodlust and warmongering among certain sectors of our political-media class especially the neoconservatives, the pusillanimity of so-called liberals, and the vapidity of the media. (Click on comic image to make bigger.)
Edward Snowden was interviewed live yesterday at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas before a crowd of over three thousand. The moderator was his ACLU attorney Ben Wizner and Chris Soghoian who is the principal technologist for the ACLU was also part of the panel. The event lasted an hour. You can read a live blog of the session or watch it below.
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Max Blumenthal writes that although there have been many people who have been criticizing his book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel that takes a hard look at what Israeli society has become, they have been reluctant to share a stage with him and debate the issues.
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