I am still reading Jeremy Scahill’s long but engrossing book Dirty Wars that looks at how the US government now essentially views the entire world as a battlefield and feels that it is free to attack anyone anywhere that it decides is a threat. The book’s main focus is of course the wars in the Middle East but the three interweaving major threads that run through the book shift from events in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan to other countries, especially Yemen and Somalia. [Read more…]

ProPublica has published a list (with supporting sources) of all the things that Barack Obama, when he was a US senator, advocated when it came to government surveillance and for which he seems to have conveniently developed amnesia now. Here are the items: [Read more…]

It looks like a significant element of the Republican party has convinced itself that brinkmanship that threatens to bring the government to a halt by withholding funding for its operations unless Obama care is repealed is a winning strategy. They are threatening to shut down the government in the fall unless all funding for Obamacare is removed. This policy is so insane that it has alarmed even people like Mitt Romney. [Read more…]

I think that we need a revised version of Godwin’s Law for anyone who trots out 9/11 as the justification for giving the government sweeping powers that allow it to ride roughshod over the constitution and human and civil rights. New Jersey governor Chris Christie is the latest to hide his authoritarian nature behind the events of 9/11, even stooping to biblical language about ‘widows and orphans’. [Read more…]

NPR reporter Margot Adler does softer feature stories for the network and is one of their best reporters, thoughtfully examining various aspects of political and social life. From various things she has spoken about in the past, I figure she is roughly my age which is perhaps why I find many of her takes on issues resonating with me.

In a recent report she described her experience during a recent visit to a college where it struck her forcefully how rapidly views on gender identify have changed in recent years and how she, like many of us in the older generation, has to learn to keep up with the changes, especially with the nature of civil rights struggles. (You can listen to the audio below or read the transcript here. [Read more…]

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution is short and to the point.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The phrases I italicized state quite clearly that you can only search a person’s private possessions if you get a warrant from a judge and that warrant must have as its basis a sworn oath that there is probable cause to suspect that there is evidence to be found, and that what is to be searched has to be clearly specified in advance. It is meant to prevent the government from simply invading people’s privacy at random, hoping to find something incriminating. [UPDATE: See the comment by dmclean for a more sophisticated analysis of what is allowed and not allowed by the Fourth Amendment.] [Read more…]

As another byproduct of the Edward Snowden revelations, it has become clear that the real legislative division in the US is not between the House of Representatives and the Senate but between an Insider Congress and an Outsider Congress.

The defense of the Obama administration to the revelations about widespread NSA surveillance is that they have ‘fully informed’ members of Congress, and since these members are supposed to be representatives of the people, then everything is fine. But as this article from Glenn Greenwald points out, there seems to be two Congresses. There is an inner coterie of people who are in the leadership and who get secret briefings and support the government’s programs and its secrecy, and there are the rest who are stonewalled when they ask for information, and yet are expected to vote on issues without knowing what is going on. [Read more…]

It turns out (what a surprise) that the massive collection of data by the NSA is not being used just for detecting terrorist threats.

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. [Read more…]