The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a unanimous that the ban on same-sex marriage in unconstitutional, making it the 17th state to do so. This was not such a big surprise. The same court had ruled in August 22 of this year that a photographer could not deny services to a same-sex couple. (I will write more about this case later because it offers some interesting features.) [Read more…]

President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies tasked to review NSA procedures has released its report and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. Given that the committee was stacked with intelligence services insiders, I had expected it to offer merely superficial changes but that was not the case. While it did not go as far as I would have liked, it was not a rubber stamp for existing programs either. This may be because there has been so much publicly expressed skepticism about this committee that it made it hard for them to appear to confirm those suspicions. [Read more…]

Another day, another blockbuster Snowden-based revelation.

From previous revelations, we knew that the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have been vacuuming up and storing people’s information pretty indiscriminately. But today brings new revelations from the Edward Snowden documents reveal the stunning extent of targeted spying on people and organizations., including such organizations as the well-known United Nations children’s charity. [Read more…]

One group of people whose struggle against the intrusions of the government into our privacy should be recognized a lot more than they are currently are, are our librarians. For centuries, libraries have been the gateway to the world of knowledge for people and since librarians are the ones who assist us and are aware of our reading habits, it should not be surprising that governments have targeted them when they want to get information about what we are seeking knowledge about. [Read more…]

America has a well-deserved reputation for prudishness. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the various laws around the nation that concern sex, though many of them are relics that no one has got around to expunging and are usually not enforced. But their existence has led to a lot of wags making up laws that are ridiculous but seem plausible, given the way that people seem to get unhinged when it comes to sex. [Read more…]

The US government has gone to great lengths to portray Edward Snowden as some kind of loner, a loser, a narcissistic fame-seeker, a criminal, a drop out with a grievance who was trying to discredit a government that was tirelessly seeking only that which was good and noble. They have been aided in this effort by some elements in the media, such as last week’s CBS’s 60 Minutes story on the NSA that has been widely panned as giving a platform for NSA propaganda. Given its recent debacle on the Benghazi story, one wonders how long that show can portray itself as a credible news outlet. [Read more…]

Diplomatic relations between India and the US have been rocked by the treatment meted out to Devyani Khobragade, the Indian deputy consul-general in New York, who was accused of providing false information to obtain a work visa for a household employee.

I saw the original story a day or so ago and was not surprised. The dirty little secret is that there are people from developing countries who work in embassies or international organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund who, used to having cheap live-in domestic help at home, bring them to the US by getting visas for them by saying that they pay them more than they actually do. Such employees often live lives of indentured servitude, since they live in a strange land where they know nobody and don’t speak the language and are thus unable to complain. [Read more…]

Dan Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University, makes the case that it was the decision by the Obama administration to force down the plane of Bolivian president Evo Morales because of suspicions that Edward Snowden may have been on board. [Read more…]

Using surprisingly strong language, US District Court judge Richard J. Leon issued a preliminary injunction yesterday to stop the NSA from proceeding with its major telephone wiretapping and data collection program against two people. The complaint was brought by conservative activist lawyer Larry Klayman and Charles Strange, the father of a cryptologist for the NSA and a support member for Navy SEAL Team VI who was killed in Afghanistan when his helicopter was shot down in 2011. [Read more…]