The Obama administration and its allies in Congress and the media have defended the widespread global spying by the NSA on the grounds that it has prevented 54 terrorist attacks, giving the impression that most of them were aimed at the US. This became accepted as a fact, as unchallenged statements by authority figures often do, and one hears it being thrown around by supporters of the authoritarian national security state. [Read more…]
In addition to Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, the new Greenwald-Omidya venture has hired Dan Froomkin and Liliana Segura, both well-known journalists with an independent turn of mind. [Read more…]
Starting today, there will be cuts in the benefits paid to poor families under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program. [Read more…]
The repeated revelations of how the US and UK governments have spied massively on everyone has had the desired effect of turning public opinion against this practice and now all those responsible are trying to evade blame. The revelations of spying on the leaders of friendly nations has been particularly embarrassing for the elites. So we have now entered the stage where everyone who had a hand in this (the White House, the NSA, Congress) is trying to blame everyone else for the fiasco. This is a good thing because it is when there are splits among the ruling elites that we get a glimpse of how things really work. [Read more…]
It turns out that the NSA was spying on all Vatican communications too, including those of pope Francis even before he became the pope and was just cardinal Jorge Bergoglio. The report is from an Italian newsmagazine and has not been confirmed but given all that we know about the NSA’s activities, it would not be at all surprising. [Read more…]
And the Edward Snowden hits keep coming.
Barton Gellman, one of the outlets for the NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden, has another big story that expands yet again the range of spying done by the NSA on American companies and Americans, even to the extent of storing actual content and not just metadata. [Read more…]
Max Blumenthal has spent considerable time in Israel and has written a new book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel and he says that there is an increased right-wing trend in Israel, and that intolerance and outright racism are taking hold, even among the secular youth, and that these disturbing trends are being encouraged by the central institutions of Israeli society. [Read more…]
It is rapidly becoming conventional wisdom, because of the determined effort to repeat it at every opportunity by supporters of the NSA and the national security state in general, that all these revelations of government spying is no big deal. Didn’t these people’s mothers’ tell them what mothers all over the globe tell their children when they ask to do something because all their friends are doing it: “If they jump over a cliff, are you going to jump too?” [Read more…]
British prime minister David Cameron is threatening to take action against British newspapers like The Guardian for publishing the Snowden leaks. He used as his excuse for such an action a newspaper report in which an anonymous security source had said that the leaks had hampered their terrorist investigations. [Read more…]