Edward Snowden is being charged by the Obama administration with espionage under the 1917 Espionage Act that was introduced to criminalize dissent against World War I. Up until the Obama administration, a grand total to three people had been charged under this act for leaking information, including Daniel Ellsberg. Obama alone has now prosecuted seven people. So according to Obama, we are now having an epidemic of spying, far more than during all the years of actual war and the Cold War combined. [Read more…]

The head of the NSA Keith Alexander has asked Congress to pass legislation that would give blanket immunity to companies that commit illegal activities at the request of the NSA. Alexander explains it this way, “If the government asks the company to do something to protect the networks, or to do something and a mistake is made, and it was our fault, then they should have liability protection for that.” [Read more…]

One sign of an authoritarian society is how authorities react to those whom they feel are not properly subservient to them. The American people are slowly being conditioned to be obsequious to government power. Mike Spindell writes about a bill being discussed in the New York State Senate that would make it a felony to, among other things, ‘annoy’ a police officer in the course of his duties. He gives a long list of cases where the police have taken offense at people who were acting perfectly legally but not subserviently. [Read more…]

Under a Freedom of Information Act request, the US government has finally released the names of the 166 detainees it is holding at Guantanamo, including 46 whom it has condemned to permanent incarceration without trial. [Read more…]

Republicans are torn between wanting to criticize Edward Snowden for undermining the national security state that they love so much and did so much to create and wanting to praise him for embarrassing president Obama. But I thought the real test of what they felt about this story would come from the six people that clearly have set their eyes on the Republican nomination for 2016. How they react would be indicative of where they felt their party’s base was. [Read more…]

One of the arguments being used against Edward Snowden is that instead of going public, he should have informed his superiors or Congress and taken it through the proper channels. But USA Today had interviews with four whistleblowers (three of whom Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe used to work the NSA, and the fourth Jesselyn Radack who used to work for the Justice Department and now serves as their lawyer) explain that when they tried to do just that, not only were they stonewalled, their efforts were actually used against them. [Read more…]

I said that I would wait for evidence before believing the Obama administration’s claims last week that the Syrian government had used sarin. Given the US government’s past history of blatantly lying in order to win public support for its warlike intentions, that seems to be the obviously prudent thing to do. And sure enough, Matthew Schofield of the McClatchy news service writes that chemical weapons experts are casting doubts on US claims. [Read more…]

The recent election of Hassan Rouhani as the new president of Iran is an interesting development. The fact that he is a cleric is undoubtedly a cause for worry since that means that he is unlikely to push for liberalization of some of the government’s policies, especially towards women and the LGBT community. [Read more…]