The Freedom of the Press Foundation has launched a new system for accepting documents from whistleblowers called SecureDrop.
SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation that media organizations use to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. It was originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz. [Read more…]
The way in which a bill becomes a law was, in theory, supposed to be along the lines of this much-loved animation from the collection known as Schoolhouse Rock, educational clips set to music and aimed at children. [Read more…]
More information has emerged on why Ladar Levison, the owner of the encrypted mail service Lavabit, chose to shut down his service entirely rather than comply with government demands to provide a back door for them to secretly access all his clients’ communications. [Read more…]
After talking tough like the Hulk about how you don’t want to make him angry because he is dangerous when he is angry, senator Lindsey Graham is now pleading with his opponents not to hurt him, something that The Hulk would never do. [Read more…]
So Congress passed, and president Obama signed into law, the bill that extended government funding until January 15, 2014 and raised the debt ceiling to last until February 7, 2014. So after all the political grandstanding and posturing and interminable news conferences, we seem to have returned to the status quo, set to repeat the process in three months. And to what end? There was no repeal, defunding, delay, or anything other than the most trivial modification made in the Affordable Care Act, the supposed reason for the whole drama. [Read more…]
If the debt ceiling is raised and the government is opened, get ready for more talk of the need for a ‘Grand Bargain’ to cut spending on earned benefits (I refuse to call them by the common but misleading name of entitlements) and other programs that benefit the less well-off in order to rescue the country from the pending disaster caused by runaway debt.
But all that talk is a fraud. [Read more…]
It turns out that devout French Catholics may have been committing blasphemy for the last half-century when saying the Lord’s Prayer. It appears that the official French translation of the line “Lead us not into temptation” was translated into French in 1966 in a way that could be wrongly interpreted. [Read more…]
So it is the morning of the 16th day of the shut down and the stalemate over that and the debt ceiling continues. As is almost universally accepted, this is entirely due to the efforts of a minority of members within the Republican party who seem to be driven by a fervor that has seized on the Affordable Care Act as some kind of demon possessing the body politic that must be exorcised or the nation will plunge over the cliff like the pigs in the Bible. They say they will not accept anything less than a major undermining of the ACA. [Read more…]