Supporters of the Obama administration and the national security state make three arguments in support of its widespread snooping. One is that what the NSA and other government agencies have been doing legal, something that Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman vigorously dispute. Another is that there is judicial oversight from the federal judges of the FISA court, which has been revealed as pretty much a rubber stamp rather than a watchdog. [Read more…]

We tend to view international politics in terms of horizontal divisions with nation states competing with each other at various levels that can on occasion lead to conflicts. Sometimes this split can be taken advantage of by playing one country against the other. But in the case of Edward Snowden we see even countries that are not particularly friendly to the US closing ranks and being reluctant to give him asylum. Even South American countries who are furious at what the US and Western European countries did to the Bolivian president’s plane still have not accepted him. [Read more…]

I was amused by how some students in the language program at the University of Wisconsin treated a pair of recruiters from the NSA who were looking for people for their language analyst program. The audio in that link is much better at getting a feel for the exchanges than the transcript. [Read more…]

It is obvious that the US government is taking extraordinary measures in trying to capture Edward Snowden, from revoking his passport, using massive pressure and threats of retribution to those countries that might seek to give him asylum, to the incredible step of forcing the Bolivian president’s plane to land in Austria. President Obama might say publicly that he is not going to go out of his way to get Snowden back to the US but it is clear that he is throwing all the massive power that he has at his disposal in pursuit of this goal. He has not (as least as yet) tried to kidnap Snowden or kill him with a Nave Seal operation or a drone strike but you can bet that it is among the possibilities that are being considered. [Read more…]

LeVar Burton is a much-beloved actor, well known for his roles in Star Trek and Roots. But I watched him most along with my children when he was the host of Reading Rainbow. In this clip, he describes what he has to do to avoid being shot and killed if he is subjected to even a routine traffic stop, things that would have never occurred to me to do. Then Tim Wise compares that with his own experiences with the police as a young white man. [Read more…]

I have written before about the hunger strike being waged by over a hundred of the prisoners at Guantanamo and that the government is force-feeding them, a practice that is widely condemned as barbaric, as anyone would agree when one reads the description of it by one of the prisoners subjected to it. [Read more…]

(Via Xeni Jardin)

On this July 4th holiday when the nation goes through the annual ritual of celebrating its history and praising itself for the freedoms it gained from the British 237 years ago, it is sobering to realize that it has, almost casually, allowed the government to gut those very freedoms leaving just a brittle, hollowed-out shell that looks good on paper but has little or no substance.
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A nationwide campaign of protests is being organized for the Independence Day holiday tomorrow against widespread government spying. It is being organized by the coalition Restore the Fourth, where the ‘Fourth’ is a pun on the date as well as the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures”. [Read more…]

With all the attention so far on the US government scooping up the electronic communication records (email, phone calls, internet use, etc.) of people around the globe, we could be excused for thinking that old-fashioned postal mail was the only thing that was safe from their prying eyes. It now turns out that even our snail mail is tracked by the government, something that a victim discovered by accident when he discovered a card that had been inadvertently placed in his mail that contained instructions that his mail was to be monitored. [Read more…]