Glenn Greenwald says that the recent leaks by whistleblowers are precursors and more ae to come soon. This is excellent news.
Candidate Barack Obama in 2008 praised whistleblowers as providing a valuable service to the country but after being elected has not only not mentioned favorably even a single whisteblower, he has been one of the most vicious presidents on record in persecuting them. [Read more…]
There is more information on the atheist monument to be placed in the courthouse grounds in Bradford County in Florida that I wrote about earlier. [Read more…]
The back-to-back revelations this week that the government has been working with internet and telecommunications companies to sweep up everyone’s phone records and also to tap into the servers of internet providers, has provided startling confirmation of long-held suspicions that we now have an out-of-control national security state that does not give a damn about the constitution or individual right but will use, under the guise of the bogus war on terror, any of the extremely powerful weapons at its disposal to achieve whatever it thinks it wants or needs. We have allowed the creation of a national security behemoth and that behemoth is turning on us, as such behemoths always do. Both political parties are complicit in this, as are members of congress, the judiciary, the military, and major corporations. [Read more…]
It looks like going to the FISA court and getting warrants for each new effort at widespread trawling of phone records was too much trouble for the Obama administration, even though that court is notorious for being a rubber stamp. Yet another major revelation today says that they have decided to simply get blanket permission once and for all for authorization to tap directly into the servers of major internet companies and take what they want. [Read more…]
[Update: Jesselyn Radack, who has vigorously defended the cause of whistleblowers, pans this documentary as shallow and biased.]
[Update2: Danny Schecter also blasts the film and provides important information on the unusual government-corporate backing that it got that may explain its apparent negatives of Assange, Manning, and WikiLeaks. (Thanks to Pierce R. Butler in the comments.)]
Academy award winning documentarian Alex Gibney has released a new one We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. The film’s website is here and here’s the trailer. [Read more…]
Someone has leaked to Glenn Greenwald a secret court order that shows that the Obama administration has obtained from Verizon detailed records of all its customers. The suspicions are that the government has obtained similar records from other phone companies as well. [Read more…]
The American Muslim Advisory Council in the town of Manchester, Tennessee invited the US attorney Bill Killian and the special agent for the FBI in charge of that region Kenneth Moore to talk about hate crimes, in order to foster a “public discourse in a diverse society, with a particular focus on the Muslim religion.” [Read more…]
As regular readers know, I blog on a fairly predictable schedule, each day consisting of a fairly longish think piece first thing, followed by two or three shorter items. I choose to do it this way because I like having a routine and these self-imposed demands help me maintain a writing discipline, while enabling me to also do my job and live the rest of my life. [Read more…]
As regular readers know, I have long been a great admirer of the work that Glenn Greenwald does. In a recent essay he discusses reader-funded journalism which he thinks is the way that quality news will be generated in the future, because it will enable writers to free themselves from the clutches of big corporate media entities and thus not be confined by their boundaries of what constitutes ‘acceptable’ journalism or commentary. It is an interesting take, worth reading for those who care about ensuring quality news media.
He also mentions his annual fundraiser to help support his work and I urge those who believe in this type of journalism to contribute here.
For reasons that are obscure to me, Andrew Sullivan and his blog The Dish are highly popular. He is often cited as someone whose opinion is worth considering and is a frequent guest on talk shows. But he has always struck me as someone who has no internal compass to guide him but worships power and those who possess it. The only purpose he serves to me is as a reliable indicator of where the boundaries of conventional wisdom lie, because he cruises close enough to give himself the air of a daring thinker while not threatening the current social order. [Read more…]