I have been writing regularly about the abusive behavior of TSA agents at US airports. But other countries are not exempt from this kind of behavior. This account is by a young woman who was subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment by the Israeli equivalent of the TSA at Ben Gurion airport, to the extent of having her breast and genital areas swabbed and having to give them her underwear because her bra was a ‘security threat’, all in the vicinity of a male security guard who smirked at her whenever he came into her direct presence. [Read more…]

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…]

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…]

There is a short clip of Edward Snowden speaking in Moscow on the occasion of receiving the Sam Adams Award, where he explains why the mass surveillance programs carried out by agencies like the NSA are actually making us less safe, not more. [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…]

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…]