More Snowden revelations

The Guardian has released video of the second part of the interview that Edward Snowden gave on June 6 to Glenn Greenwald. Laura Poitras, and Ewan MacAskill. (The first part can be seen here.) In this seven-minute clip, he explains what made him do what he did, saying, “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I am willing to support, it’s not something I am willing to build, and its not something I am willing to live under. So I think anyone who opposes that sort of world has an obligation to act in the way they can.” He says he acted because the people who should have spoken up or stopped it did not do so. [Read more…]

The vexing issue of dress codes

The issue of dress codes is one that arouses strong passions. Part of the problem is the gender bias involved. What women wear comes under much closer scrutiny than what men wear and the stringent dress codes that Muslim (and Orthodox Jewish) women must operate under in many parts of the world is one of the hottest of issues. In 35 nations some form of veiling of women is compulsory. [Read more…]

How the NSA spies on other countries

The front page of the Sunday edition of a major Brazilian newspaper O Globo today had the headline “US spied on millions of emails and calls of Brazilians” and was a story about how the NSA was spying on the communications of millions of Brazilians. (Rough English translation here.) This story was also provided by Edward Snowden, just as the earlier Der Spiegel story about spying on Germans. [Read more…]

Is the rise of the religiously unaffiliated good or bad?

It has been established that the number of people in the US who self-identify as unaffiliated with any religion is steadily on the rise, now reaching about 20%. One would expect that those who are religious would see it as a bad thing, while the non-religious would see this as a good thing, resulting in an 80-20% split as to whether this trend was bad or good. [Read more…]

Was the US government punked?

A question that has been swirling around is how it could have happened that the European governments got it all wrong about Edward Snowden being on the Bolivian president’s plane and caused them, in what can be described as an act of air piracy, to close their airspace and force it to land in Austria, creating a backlash around the world at what was seen as a naked act of western imperialism and colonialism. [Read more…]

Why the Guardian?

One of the interesting questions is how it came to be that the Guardian has become such a major player in international media. It is, after all, at its core a relatively small British newspaper with a daily print circulation of around 160,000. And yet it has broken major story after major story, sidelining ostensibly bigger players like the Washington Post and the New York Times. It was the leader in publishing the WikiLeaks documents, it uncovered Rupert Murdoch’s illegal phone tapping, and now it has been the clear leader in revealing Edward Snowden’s documents. [Read more…]