Canada is one of the ‘Five Eyes’ group of English speaking countries that formed a pact following World War II to share their spying information, the others being the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. This arrangement enables these governments to skirt the letter of the law that some countries have that prevent spying on their own citizens, since each country can spy on others and then share the information. [Read more…]
Apparently it is a tradition for the US president to give an interview to a television network just before the Superb Owl game each year and this year the interviewer was Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly. I did not watch it, of course, because O’Reilly is a waste of time, a blowhard who tries to pretend that he is a serious journalist. [Read more…]
You may recall that following the erection of a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol in Oklahoma, a Hindu group proposed putting up a statue to their god Hanuman and a Satanic group has proposed one too. Gideon Resnick joined the New York—based Satanic Temple to learn more people behind the latter effort. This group of Satanists seems closer in outlook to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster than to anything occult. [Read more…]
As children, many of us believed crazy things, such as the existence of ghosts and fairies and other manifestations of the magical or supernatural. As we grew up, we abandoned many of those absurd beliefs, mainly due to our growing realization that they did not make any sense. But in addition, as we got older our families did not actively seek to have us continue to believe them and, in the case of things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, actively sought to dissuade us from doing so. Society at large also does not have a vested interest in propagating a lot of magical thinking. [Read more…]
Ahmed Shihab-Eldin is an American journalist of Palestinian origin who has worked at a range of news organizations in the US and abroad and often has to go on overseas assignments. He says that he dreads coming back because of the appalling way he is treated every time by US immigration officials. He recounts his experiences, including the latest one when he was returning from covering the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. [Read more…]
The Republican members of the House of Representatives had a retreat last week and minority leader Eric Cantor had to tell them some surprising news and that is that not all Americans are business owners. [Read more…]
You may recall the case of Lavabit that I have written about before where Ladar Levinson, the owner of that encrypted mail service, shut down his business to avoid giving the government the master encryption key they demanded so that they could read all his 410,000 clients’ emails. This happened last June, likely when the US government first learned of the NSA leaks and discovered that Edward Snowden used Lavabit to communicate. [Read more…]
There was a furor when the TSA introduced its infamous body scanners at airports. Quickly dubbed the ‘porno scanners’, it was alleged that these devices could be used to see people naked. The TSA vigorously denied it, saying that it was used in such a way that only it would only be used to find weapons. [Read more…]
As I wrote recently, last Sunday the German television station ARD broadcast an interview with Edward Snowden in Moscow in which he revealed a few more details about NSA spying such as that they were also targeting big German corporations such as Siemens. I based my comments on a print report of the TV interview that appeared in the Guardian and in the comments reader Jorg was kind enough to provide a link to the actual broadcast. [Read more…]
I did not watch president Obama’s State of the Union speech. These ritualized events are almost entirely political theater with very little substance. The routine is familiar. Obama will give a speech outlining some of his extremely modest goals and the Republicans will bemoan what they claim is his pursuit of a radical agenda and his lack of willingness to engage in dialogue with them and compromise. [Read more…]