Recommended Reading

January 13, 2014 "Do NSA's Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorism?"
February 7, 2014 "State prodded on ID security"
April 14, 2014 "FBI Plans to Have 52 Million Photos in Its NGI Face Recognition Database by Next Year"
May 1, 2014 "My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal"
May 5, 2014 "Debate on state surveillance: Greenwald and Ohanian vs. Hayden and Dershowitz"
May 7, 2014 "How Cell Phone Search and Seizure Could Radically Affect Privacy"
May 12, 2014 "'Frontline' Doc Explores How Sept. 11 Created Today's NSA"
June 10, 2014 "Can We Beat the Surveillance State?"
July 4, 2014 "CIA employee's quest to release information 'destroyed my entire career'"
July 5, 2014 "In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are"
July 9, 2014 "Under Surveillance: Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On"
July 9, 2014 "What a Muslim American Said to Defend His Patriotism"
July 10, 2014 "The 25th Hour: Still Living With Jack Bauer in a Terrified New American World"
July 11, 2014 "NSA chief knew of Snowden file destruction by Guardian in UK"
July 14, 2014 "Obama administration says the world's servers are ours"
July 15, 2014 "Government Continues to Pretend People Use Cell Phones Simply to Create a Wealth of Data for Law Enforcement to Access Without a Warrant"
July 16, 2014 "DOJ Claims Judge Who Trashed 'Made Up Plot' Should Be Removed for Being 'Hostile' to the Gov't"
July 17, 2014 "The Inevitable: Drunk Man Arrested for Impersonating Groping TSA Agent at Airport"
July 17, 2014 "Snowden: NSA employees routinely pass around intercepted nude photos"
July 18, 2014 "Lawsuit Filed to Force NYPD to Respect Citizens' First Amendment Right to Record Police Officers"
July 18, 2014 "Meet Executive Order 12333: The Reagan rule that lets the NSA spy on Americans"
July 19, 2014 "Ars editor learns feds have his old IP addresses, full credit card numbers"
July 20, 2014 "Arizona's Checkpoint Rebellion"
July 21, 2014 "Parallel Construction: Unconstitutional NSA Searches Deny Due Process"
July 21, 2014 "Protecting your privacy: Our stand against 'mandatory data retention'"
July 22, 2014 "Prosecutors Are Reading Emails From Inmates to Lawyers"
July 23, 2014 "Report: All But Four of the High-Profile Domestic Terrorism Plots in the Last Decade Were Crafted From the Ground Up by the FBI"
July 23, 2014 "Blacklisted: The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a Terrorist"
July 24, 2014 "Texas Dept. of Public Safety Quietly Starts Demanding Full Set of Prints From Drivers License Applicants"
July 25, 2014 "9/11 Commission's '10 Years Later' Report: The Only Problem With US Counterterrorism Is the General Public"
July 29, 2014 "The Snowden Effect: This Is Still Not America"
July 30, 2014 "How Your Innocent Smartphone Passes On Almost Your Entire Life to the Secret Service"
July 31, 2014 "CIA admits it broke into Senate computers; senators call for spy chief's ouster"
July 31, 2014 "Guilt by association and retconning reality"
August 3, 2014 "The Fourth Branch: The Rise to Power of the National Security State"
August 5, 2014 "UNSEALED: The US Sought Permission to Change the Historical Record of a Public Court Proceeding"
August 5, 2014 "Watch Commander: Barack Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers"
August 6, 2014 "New leaker disclosing U.S. secrets, government concludes"
August 6, 2014 "The CIA Must Tell the Truth About My Rendition at 12 Years Old"
August 7, 2014 "Boston Trolling (Part I): You Partied Hard at Boston Calling and There's Facial Recognition Data to Prove It"
August 10, 2014 "The Crackdown Before the Crackdown"
August 11, 2014 "NYPD Puts Terrorism on the Run by Ordering Twitter to Turn Over Parody Account User Data 'Linked' to Brooklyn Bridge Flag-Switching"
August 12, 2014 "NYPD Officer Chokes Man to Death; Cops Blame Cellphone Recordings and People 'Feeling They Have More Rights'"
August 14, 2014 "The problem with the police's plea to 'Tweet Smart'"
August 14, 2014 "To Terrify and Occupy: How the Excessive Militarization of the Police Is Turning Cops Into Counterinsurgents"
August 14, 2014 "Ferguson Law Enforcement: An 'Occupying Force' With 'Special Rights'"
August 14, 2014 "Tear gas is a chemical weapon banned in war. But Ferguson police shoot it at protestors."
August 14, 2014 "The Militarization of U.S. Police: Finally Dragged Into the Light by the Horrors of Ferguson"
August 14, 2014 "The fiasco in Ferguson shows why you don't give military equipment to cops"
August 15, 2014 "A Militarized Police, a Less Violent Public"
August 19, 2014 "Binney: 'The NSA's main motives: power and money'"
August 20, 2014 "LAPD Officer Says Tragedies Could Be Prevented If Citizens Would Just Shut Up and Do What Cops Tell Them To"
August 20, 2014 "A Former Marine Explains All the Weapons of War Being Used by Police in Ferguson"
August 21, 2014 "Petition to Require All Police to Have Body Cameras Breaks 100,000 Signatures"
August 22, 2014 "The FBI's Criminal Database Is Filling Up With Non-Criminals and No One in Law Enforcement Seems to Care"
August 26, 2014 "Documents: Tacoma police using surveillance device to sweep up cellphone data"
August 27, 2014 "Here's More Evidence That NSA Fears Are Chilling Online Discussions"
August 30, 2014 "Jail won't hold immigrants without probable cause"
September 4, 2014 "The Miraculous Works of the Criminal Justice System"
September 15, 2014 "Sheriff Accused of Keeping Secret Database"
September 15, 2014 "TSA Not Sure If It Groped Man Before Flight, Demands to Grope Him After Flight Is Over"
September 16, 2014 "L.A. schools police will return grenade launchers but keep rifles, armored vehicle"
September 16, 2014 "Israel's N.S.A. Scandal"
September 17, 2014 "Irate NSA Staffer Doesn't Like Being Filmed in Public, for Some Reason"
September 19, 2014 "Two Top Intelligence Officials, Both of Whom Admitted to Lying in the Past, Now Try to Rewrite History and Deny the Lies"
September 20, 2014 "Man claims police seized car illegally"
September 20, 2014 "Orin Kerr's Dangerous Thinking"
September 22, 2014 "Australia's Prime Minister Gives a Master Class in Exploiting Terrorism Fears to Seize New Powers"
September 23, 2014 "FBI Plans Rapid DNA Dragnets"
September 24, 2014 "Court Throws Out Case Against TSA Nude Body Scanners"
September 24, 2014 "Is Obama misleading the world to war? Depends how you define 'misleading'"
September 29, 2014 "Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration"
September 30, 2014 "Police Want to Get Rid of Their Pentagon-Issued Combat Gear. Here's Why They Can't."
October 7, 2014 "How Australia just became a 'national security state'"
October 7, 2014 "Dutch IT Contractor Suggest Letting Police Have Direct Real-Time Access to All of Your Devices...For Your Safety"
October 7, 2014 "ISIS in Washington: America's Soundtrack of Hysteria"
October 14, 2014 "On Leak Prosecutions, Obama Takes It to 11. (Or Should We Say 526?)"
October 16, 2014 "Supreme Court Rejects Cell-Phone Tracking by Police"
October 17, 2014 "Police in Washington, DC Are Using the Secretive 'Stingray' Cell Phone Tracking Tool"
October 20, 2014 "Police Officer Blames Everyone Else But Police Officers for the Public's General Distrust of Law Enforcement"
October 22, 2014 "Seattle Cops Bring Lawsuit Claiming They Have a Constitutional Right to Use Excessive Force"
October 22, 2014 "Frequent Flyer 'Terrorist' Who Blogs About TSA Troubles Was Watchlisted for Animal Activism"

The Court Jester

John Oliver has been doing a great job on his HBO show Last Week Tonight. He's not only very funny, but he's talking about some of the most important issues of our time with the honesty and passion they deserve. You won't get this kind of coverage from most other media outlets. Net neutrality, the death penalty, predatory lending, sponsored advertising, false balance in climate change reporting—so many of his segments have me cheering, "Finally, someone is saying this!" And not for the first time, the most incisive analysis of current events comes from a comedian. The court jester is often described as the only person who could speak truth to the king.

He recently did an excellent segment on police militarization.



He's also talked about our broken prison system.



More of this, please!

Recommended Reading

February 10, 2014 "Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State"
April 20, 2014 "Too Big to Jail?: Why Kidnapping, Torture, Assassination, and Perjury Are No Longer Crimes in Washington"
April 22, 2014 "They Are Watching You: The National Security State and the U.S.-Mexican Border"
April 23, 2014 "Due to license plate reader error, cop approaches innocent man, weapon in hand"
April 25, 2014 "Post-Occupy, #myNYPD Makes New York's Blood Boil"
April 26, 2014 "Protections for e-data clear Senate committee"
April 28, 2014 "US senators remove requirement for disclosure over drone strike victims"
May 1, 2014 "Glenn Greenwald: The NSA's 'collect it all' mission"
May 1, 2014 "Glenn Greenwald on politeness, privacy and the surveillance state"
May 2, 2014 "State surveillance under microscope"
May 6, 2014 "7 mass surveillance tools your local police might be using"
May 7, 2014 "ACLU raises red flag over traffic cameras"
May 8, 2014 "ODNI Requires Pre-Publication Review of All Public Information"
May 8, 2014 "Keith Alexander Unplugged: on Bush/Obama, 1.7 million stolen documents and other matters"
May 8, 2014 "Portland police arrest, handcuff a nine-year-old girl"
May 12, 2014 "The Government's Antipathy Towards Transparency Has Made FOIA Lawsuits the Default Process"
May 12, 2014 "Michael Hayden Gleefully Admits: We Kill People Based on Metadata"
May 12, 2014 "Internet Subversion"
May 12, 2014 "Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers"
May 12, 2014 "Glenn Greenwald: from Martin Luther King to Anonymous, the state targets dissenters not just 'bad guys'"
May 13, 2014 "No Place to Hide: Monumentally important book shines a spotlight on the surveillance state"
May 14, 2014 "Who watches the watchers? Big Data goes unchecked"
May 14, 2014 "The official US position on the NSA is still unlimited eavesdropping power"
May 14, 2014 "No Place to Hide: A Conservative Critique of a Radical NSA"
May 15, 2014 "Who Has Your Back?: A Report From the Electronic Frontier Foundation"
May 15, 2014 "Bill to curb NSA spying looks like change, but isn't really"
May 16, 2014 "Maximum Orwell: Ending the War Without End, by Enabling a New War Without End...and Less Oversight"
May 16, 2014 "Keith Alexander Declares Failure in War on Terror, as He Earlier Declared Failure in Cyberdefense"
May 17, 2014 "Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA"
May 19, 2014 "What's the Point of a Source Protection Law That Wouldn't Protect Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden?"
May 19, 2014 "Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Phone Call in the Bahamas"
May 20, 2014 "Secrets, lies and Snowden's email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit"
May 21, 2014 "DOJ reverses no-recording policy for interrogations"
May 22, 2014 "Expensive TSA Nudie Scanners Find a New Home: Prisons"
May 22, 2014 "'Journalist' Argues in NY Times That Publishing Decisions Should Ultimately Be Made by Government"
May 22, 2014 "Edward Snowden: Pentagon report on 'grave' threat is gravely overblown"
May 23, 2014 "Another Bogus Hit From a License Plate Reader Results in Another Citizen Surrounded by Cops With Guns Out"
May 23, 2014 "Another Former NSA Lawyer Says He Wouldn't Have Listened to Concerns About the Agency's Surveillance Programs"
May 24, 2014 "Final Word on U.S. Law Isn't: Supreme Court Keeps Editing"
May 27, 2014 "A Small Right With a Huge Loophole"
May 28, 2014 "Information Highway Robbery"
May 30, 2014 "How Many Terrorists Are There: Not As Many As You Might Think"
May 30, 2014 "Google's car would give it even more remote control over us"
May 30, 2014 "Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trail--and Kerry is wrong"
May 31, 2014 "N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images"
May 31, 2014 "Quantifying Privacy: A Week of Location Data May Be an 'Unreasonable Search'"
June 2, 2014 "The Top 5 Claims That Defenders of the NSA Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible"
June 3, 2014 "U.S. Marshals Seize Local Cops' Cell Phone Tracking Files in Extraordinary Attempt to Keep Information From Public"
June 3, 2014 "Dow Jones asks court to unseal long-completed digital surveillance cases"
June 4, 2014 "Appeals court in Chicago holds highly unusual 'secret' session"
June 4, 2014 "Major terrorism trial could be held in secret for first time in UK legal history"
June 5, 2014 "Vodafone reveals existence of secret wires that allow state surveillance"
June 5, 2014 "On 6/5, 65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance That We Didn't Know a Year Ago"
June 10, 2014 "Don't Walk Away From War: It's Not the American Way"
June 11, 2014 "Six Officers Charged in Police Pursuit That Ended With 137 Shots Being Fired at Suspects in a Little Over 20 Seconds"
June 11, 2014 "Federal Appeals Court: Warrant for Cell Phone Location Data Is Required Under Fourth Amendment"
June 12, 2014 "Law Enforcement Agencies Continue to Obtain Military Equipment, Claiming the United States Is a 'War Zone'"
June 12, 2014 "New Pennsylvania law allows school districts to record student conversations on buses"
June 12, 2014 "The Price of Soccer Safety"
June 12, 2014 "U.S. pushing local cops to stay mum on surveillance"
June 12, 2014 "Uncle Sam Doesn't Want You--He Already Has You: The Militarized Realities of Fortress America"
June 14, 2014 "The Fog Machine of War"
June 15, 2014 "What We've Lost Since 9/11: Taking Down the First Amendment in Post-Constitutional America"
June 16, 2014 "State Legislators Discussing Laws That Will Put Law Enforcement Surveillance Cameras Inside Private Businesses"
June 16, 2014 "The Limits of Signals Intelligence"
June 18, 2014 "How the NSA may be using games to encourage digital snooping"
June 19, 2014 "Important Victories for the Fourth Amendment May Pose Big Threat to Dragnet"
June 20, 2014 "Stingray Documents Show Law Enforcement Using 'Terrorism' to Obtain Equipment to Fight Regular Crime"
June 23, 2014 "Consume, Conform, Obey: What Homeland Security's Targeting of Anti-Consumerist Activities Says About the Government's Desires"
June 23, 2014 "DOJ Drone Memo: AUMF Trumps All and Rights Are Subject to Arbitrary Revocation in Times of 'War'"
June 24, 2014 "Obama's 'drone memo' is finally public. Now show us the library of secret law"
June 24, 2014 "Court Rules No Fly List Is Unconstitutional and Must Be Reformed"
June 24, 2014 "US police departments are increasingly militarised, finds report"
June 24, 2014 "A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son"
June 25, 2014 "Supreme Court Says Law Enforcement Can't Search Mobile Phones Without a Warrant"
June 25, 2014 "EFF and 31 Other Organizations Call for Privacy Assessment of FBI's Biometric Database"
June 26, 2014 "Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they're private corporations, immune from open records laws"
June 26, 2014 "Shredding the Fourth Amendment in Post-Constitutional America: Four Ways It No Longer Applies"
June 27, 2014 "EFF, Greenpeace Fly Blimp Over NSA's Utah Datacenter; Launch Campaign to Stop Illegal Internet Spying"
June 30, 2014 "FBI, CIA Use Backdoor Searches to Warrantlessly Spy on Americans' Communications"
July 2, 2014 "Report Finds NSA Programs Legal, but Legal Doesn't Equal Right"
July 3, 2014 "NSA Targets the Privacy-Conscious for Surveillance"

Recommended Reading

March 4, 2014 "Meet the Company That Can Track Everywhere You've Been and Tell Police About It"
March 4, 2014 "Silencing Whistleblowers Obama-Style: Supreme Court Edition?"
March 7, 2014 "How the Repo Industry Is Tracking You and Selling Data About You to, Well, Everyone"
March 7, 2014 "The NSA Has an Advice Columnist. Seriously."
March 7, 2014 "Cellphone spying technology being used throughout Northern California"
March 9, 2014 "The CIA brought darkness to America by fighting in the shadows"
March 9, 2014 "I got 30 months in prison. Why does Leon Panetta get a pass?"
March 10, 2014 "US Network to Scan Workers with Secret Clearances"
March 11, 2014 "How the FBI Has Been Working Hard to Deport Friends of Guy They Killed During Interview About Boston Bombing"
March 11, 2014 "Why Won't Senator Feinstein Call Torture Torture?"
March 12, 2014 "CIA lawyer at center of computer snooping clash"
March 12, 2014 "MetaPhone: The Sensitivity of Telephone Metadata"
March 13, 2014 "Intelligence Community Vilifies Whistleblowers Like Snowden. While Barely Mentioning Actual Spies"
March 16, 2014 "US Cites Security More to Censor, Deny Records"
March 17, 2014 "House Committee to Investigate NHTSA's Roadside Blood and Saliva 'Surveys'"
March 18, 2014 "Coming to Grips With Our Not-So-New Surveillance State"
March 18, 2014 "NSA surveillance program reaches 'into the past' to retrieve, replay phone calls"
March 18, 2014 "FBI: Look Mom, We 'Found' Another Terrorist!"
March 19, 2014 "The Spirit of the Fourth Amendment--and the NSA's Disregard for It"
March 20, 2014 "Judge Otis Wright Slams 'Made Up' Government 'Plot' Designed to Ensnare Gullible Poor People"
March 25, 2014 "The dumbest conclusion drawn from MH370 yet"
March 25, 2014 "Judge Scalia Suggests the Supreme Court May Be Asked to Determine Constitutionality of Metadata Program"
March 25, 2014 "Invasion of the Data Snatchers: Big Data and the Internet of Things Means the Surveillance of Everything"
March 26, 2014 "Sheriff's Dept. Charges Man With No Drugs With 'Intent to Distribute Counterfeit Controlled Substances'"
March 28, 2014 "No NSA reform can fix the American Islamophobic surveillance complex"
March 29, 2014 "Beware the surveillance reform Trojan horse: what's not in the new NSA laws?"
March 31, 2014 "CIA misled on interrogation program, Senate report says"
April 2, 2014 "New Harris poll shows NSA revelations impact online shopping, banking, and more"
April 3, 2014 "Botch a Drug Raid? No Problem, Just Seal the Warrant, Citizen Complaint and Gag Order Itself"
April 3, 2014 "Senate panel finds CIA illegally interrogated terror suspects after 9-11"
April 5, 2014 "Leak the CIA report: it's the only way to know the whole truth about torture"
April 6, 2014 "How Many Watch Lists Fit on the Head of a Pin?: Post-Constitutional America, Where Innocence Is a Poor Defense"
April 8, 2014 "The TSA vs. the Fourth Amendment: You're Free to Board a Plane, But You're Not Free to Leave the Screening Area"
April 9, 2014 "Britain Increasingly Invokes Power to Disown Its Citizens"
April 10, 2014 "The Fourth Amendment Shell Game"
April 11, 2014 "Los Angeles Cops Found to Be Tampering With Mandated Recording Devices"
April 11, 2014 "DOJ Issues Scathing Review of Albuquerque Police Department's Use of Force, Tempers It by Prioritizing Officer Safety"
April 11, 2014 "Journalists Sue Government After Military Security Seizes Cameras and Deletes Photos of Publicly-Visible Structures"
April 11, 2014 "Midwestern Town of 7,000 Approves Military Surplus Armored Personnel Carrier for Its 12-Member Police Force"
April 11, 2014 "Hollywood-style surveillance technology inches closer to reality"
April 14, 2014 "ACLU of Utah and ACLU File Friend of Court Brief in Prosecution Based on Egregious Breach of Medical Privacy"
April 16, 2014 "EHTHS prom policy is an abuse of power"
April 18, 2014 'US Has a 'Secret Exception' to Reasonable Suspicion for Putting People on the No Fly List"
April 19, 2014 "The mentality of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI undergirds todays' surveillance state"
April 21, 2014 "The top spook's stupid gag order"
April 22, 2014 "Lawsuit says FBI uses no-fly list in bid to recruit Muslim informants"
April 23, 2014 "The FBI Is Trying to Recruit Muslims as Snitches by Putting Them on No-Fly Lists"
April 23, 2014 "Police Chief: Not Wanting to Talk to Police Officers Is 'Odd'"

Recommended Reading

February 1, 2014 "You're Not a Terrorist? Are You Sure?"
February 3, 2014 "Parallel Construction Revealed: How the DEA Is Trained to Launder Classified Surveillance Info"
February 4, 2014 "War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked Hackers, Snowden Docs Show"
February 4, 2014 "Has the NSA Wiretapping Violated Attorney-Client Privilege?"
February 5, 2014 "New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours at a time"
February 5, 2014 "Following Latest GCHQ Revelations, Who Are the Real Criminals?"
February 5, 2014 "Rep. Mike Rogers Angry That 'Red Tape' Is Preventing More Drone Bombings of Innocent People"
February 5, 2014 "'The NSA Doesn't Spy on Americans'"
February 6, 2014 "Police will have 'backdoor' access to health records despite opt-out, says MP"
February 6, 2014 "Selling Your Secrets: The Invisible World of Software Backdoors and Bounty Hunters"
February 7, 2014 "Snowden Docs: British Spies Used Sex and 'Dirty Tricks'"
February 7, 2014 "After an FBI Agent Checked the Wrong Box, a Woman Was Barred From US Entry for 9 Years"
February 7, 2014 "Court Says FBI Agent's Wrong Checkmark Put Woman on No Fly List, Barred Her From the US for 10 Years"
February 7, 2014 "Immunity Shields Claims on Strip-Search of Teens"
February 10, 2014 "Sheriff's Deputy Fired for Harassing Journalist Taking Photos of an Arrest on a Public Street"
February 10, 2014 "Gov't Officials Leak Classified Info to Journalists to Discredit Snowden for Leaking Classified Info to Journalists"
February 10, 2014 "Obama pressured over drone policy amid reports US citizen targeted"
February 10, 2014 "The NSA's Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program"
February 11, 2014 "You Know Who Else Collected Metadata? The Stasi."
February 13, 2014 "Behold the Selective Outrage Over National-Security Leaks"
February 13, 2014 "Cecily McMillan's Occupy trial is a huge test of US civil liberties. Will they survive?"
February 14, 2014 "How a Grand Jury's Indictment Is Indistinguishable From Being Found Guilty"
February 14, 2014 "'State Secrets,' Non-Denials and Lies: How the Government Tried to Bury Its 'No Fly' List Screwup"
February 14, 2014 "Sochi's Other Legacy"
February 15, 2014 "Spying by N.S.A. Ally Entangled U.S. Law Firm"
February 16, 2014 "Drone Killing the Fifth Amendment: How to Build a Post-Constitutional America One Death at a Time"
February 18, 2014 "New Hampshire State Legislator Hopes to Push Back Against Police Militarization With New Bill"
February 18, 2014 "State high court says warrants are needed for law enforcement to obtain cellphone location data"
February 19, 2014 "Kill Switches: Phones Just the Start"
February 20, 2014 "Meet Jack. Or, What the Government Could Do With That Location Data"
February 20, 2014 "It's time to break up the NSA"
February 20, 2014 "Documenting Darkness: How a Thug State Operates"
February 21, 2014 "Judge Tosses Muslim Spying Suit Against NYPD, Says Any Damage Was Caused by Reporters Who Exposed It"
February 21, 2014 "Setting the record straight on DHS and license plate tracking"
February 21, 2014 "Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?"
February 21, 2014 "Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State"
February 24, 2014 "Police Chief to Critics of Controversial Arrest: Hey, At Least My Officers Aren't Sexually  Assaulting Arrestees"
February 24, 2014 "Cop Harasses Photographer, Steals His Cellphone Battery and Attempts to Get YouTube to Pull the Incriminating Video"
February 24, 2014 "New York's Curbs on Solitary Confinement Could Signal National Sea Change"
February 24, 2014 "How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations"
February 25, 2014 "With Great Power Comes the Thinnest Skin: 13-Year-Old Hit with Felony Charges After Throwing Snowball at Cop"
February 25, 2014 "NSA Inspector General Speaks on Snowden for First Time, Says He Was 'Manic in His Thievery'"
February 25, 2014 "DHS uses email intercepts to question US citizen about her sex life"
February 26, 2014 "American Military Dominance in One Staggering Chart"
February 26, 2014 "The Definitive Case for Ending Solitary Confinement"
February 26, 2014 "The Plot From Solitary"
February 27, 2014 "Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ"
February 27, 2014 "NSA robots are 'collecting' your data, too, and they're getting away with it"
February 27, 2014 "The Supreme Court Has Just Given the Police Another Way to Search Your House Without a Warrant"
February 27, 2014 "DOJ Asks to Hang Onto Bulk Collections Longer, Citing Need to 'Preserve' Evidence It Has No Intention of Presenting in Court"
February 27, 2014 "Feds Refuse to Release Public Comments on NSA Reform--Citing Privacy"
February 27, 2014 "The Five Commandments of Barack Obama: How 'Thou Shalt Not' Became 'Thou Shalt'"
February 27, 2014 "Forget the NSA, the LAPD Spies on Millions of Innocent Folks"
February 28, 2014 "Keith Alexander's Big Idea: What If the NSA Just Collected Phone Data on Suspected Terrorists?"

Recommended Reading

June 12, 2013 "You're More Likely to be Killed by a Toddler than a Terrorist"
July 10, 2013 "Without the option of privacy, we are lost"
August 2, 2013 "Raiding the 'Corporate Store': The NSA's Unfettered Access to a Vast Pool of Americans' Phone Data"
November 12, 2013 "Anal Probes and the Drug War: A Look at the Ethical and Legal Issues"
December 16, 2013 "State of Deception"
December 23, 2013 "Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission's accomplished"
December 28, 2013 "Here's how data thieves have captured our lives on the internet"
December 30, 2014 "NSA stories also reveal perilous state of mainstream journalism: Greenwald"
January 2, 2014 "Op-Ed: Inside the American police state"
January 2, 2014 "America After 9/11"
January 2, 2014 "Big Brother's little siblings: How local police departments are spying on us now, too"
January 3, 2014 "'Surveillance breeds conformity': Salon's Glenn Greenwald interview"
January 5, 2014 "My 2014 resolution: stop my country from becoming a surveillance state"
January 5, 2014 "American Jihad 2014: The New Fundamentalists"
January 6, 2014 "Saving the Net from the surveillance state: Glenn Greenwald speaks up (Q&A)"
January 6, 2014 "The NSA's Surveillance Programs Aren't Making Us Any Safer"
January 6, 2014 "FBI Admits It's Not Really About Law Enforcement Any More; Ignores Lots of Crimes to Focus on Creating Fake Terror Plots"
January 6, 2014 "Number of Officers Killed in the Line of Duty Drops to 50-Year Low While Number of Citizens Killed by Cops Remains Unchanged"
January 6, 2014 "Sen. Schumer Is Wrong; Snowden Would Be Barred From Arguing His Case at Trial"
January 7, 2014 "Federal Judge Rules Indiscriminate Drug Testing of Welfare Applicants Unconstitutional"
January 7, 2014 "Counterterrorism and the Totalitarian Temptation"
January 7, 2014 "Technology? Some justices want to keep distance"
January 7, 2014 "Amazing New Book Reveals Whistleblowers of J. Edgar Hoover's Illegal FBI for the First Time"
January 7, 2014 "The Secret Burglary That Exposed J. Edgar Hoover's FBI"
January 7, 2014 "Quit Throwing 9/11 in Our Faces"
January 7, 2014 "How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet"
January 8, 2014 "ACLU challenging pain medication drug-testing rule as unconstitutional"
January 8, 2014 "What It's Like When the FBI Asks You to Backdoor Your Software"
January 9, 2014 "Obama weighs NSA reform, but our surveillance state is going nowhere"
January 9, 2014 "ACLU Sues City of Omaha, 32 Police Officers for Use of Excessive Force, Warrantless Search and Seizure"
January 9, 2014 "Snowden Critics Legitimize Government Propaganda When They Police Stories Based on His Leaks"
January 12, 2014 "The misuse of American might, and the price it pays"
January 12, 2014 "NSA phone record collection does little to prevent terrorist attacks, group says"
January 12, 2014 "City, county settle in controversial anal probing case"
January 12, 2014 "You Can't Opt Out: 10 NSA Myths Debunked"
January 13, 2014 "NSA Goes From Saying Bulk Metadata Collection 'Saves Lives' to 'Prevented 54 Attacks' to 'Well, It's a Nice Insurance Policy'"
January 13, 2014 "I Spent Two Hours With the NSA's Bigwigs. Here's What Has Them Mad"
January 15, 2014 "Scorecard: Will Obama Hit the Mark on Real NSA Reform?"
January 15, 2014 "FISA Court Judges Say They Don't Want Any Changes to How the Rubber Stamp Court Is Run"
January 16, 2014 "Obama and the N.S.A.: Why He Can't Be Trusted"
January 16, 2014 "NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep"
January 16, 2014 "60 Words and a War Without End: The Untold Story of the Most Dangerous Sentence in U.S. History"
January 17, 2014 "A Cold, Hard Look at the NSA's Metadata Program"
January 17, 2014 "Obama's restrictions on NSA surveillance rely on narrow definition of 'spying'"
January 17, 2014 "Obama's NSA 'reforms' are little more than a PR attempt to mollify the public"
January 17, 2014 "The Fact That the US Intelligence Community So Readily Admits to Fantasies of Killing Ed Snowden Shows Why They Can't Be Trusted"
January 19, 2014 "Fifty States of Fear"
January 19, 2014 "NHS patient data to be made available for sale to drug and insurance firms"
January 19, 2014 "Surveillance and Scandal: Time-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power"
January 21, 2014 "It's Sunday and It's Snowden"
January 23, 2014 "Glenn Greenwald's heroism: Standing up to our new Orwellian police state"
January 23, 2014 "Civil Liberties Board Completely Destroys Arguments for Bulk Metadata Collection: Program Is Both Illegal and Unconstitutional"
January 23, 2014 "Live Q&A with Edward Snowden"
January 24, 2014 "Three Things to Know About the Government Privacy Report on NSA Spying"
January 24, 2014 "Purdue Cops Throw Student Journalist to Ground, Seize His Camera and Detain Him for Three Hours"
January 24, 2014 "Did this Tor developer become the first known victim of the NSA's laptop interception program?"
January 25, 2014 "Contrary to Obama's promises, the US military still permits torture"
January 25, 2014 "The Corporate Store: Where NSA Goes to Shop Your Content and Your Lifestyle"
January 27, 2014 "Rooting for the Laundry: The Absolute Insanity of Decisions About the NSA Being Made Based on 'Liberal' or 'Conservative' Ideology"
January 27, 2014 "Snowden docs reveal British spies snooped on YouTube and Facebook"
January 28, 2014 "Davos to Detention: Why I Hate Coming Home to America"
January 29, 2014 "Defendant Monitored Under NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Law Files Challenge to Law's Constitutionality"
January 30, 2014 "One of Six Omaha Cops Fired for Excessive Force, Illegal Search and Seizure Is Already Back in Uniform"
January 30, 2014 "How Dianne Feinstein Exaggerates Global Terrorism"
January 30, 2014 "The Torture That Flourishes From Gitmo to an American Supermax"
January 31, 2014 "Former TSA Agent Explains Full Body Scanners Didn't Work, But Did Let Him See You Naked"
January 31, 2014 "Are Fitbit, Nike, and Garmin Planning to Sell Your Personal Fitness Data?"
January 31, 2014 "Introduce Your Child to the Surveillance State with the FiLIP Smart Watch"

A Little Perspective

So, the 2014 Boston Marathon has passed off without a hitch, as every sensible person expected it would. But of course, this wouldn't be America if, after last year's bombing, participants in this year's race weren't subjected to overwrought, ridiculous, and unnecessary so-called "security" measures. The new rules were reported a few weeks ago in the Globe:

Runners who like to run in costume won't be allowed to wear anything that covers their face or bulky clothes; strollers won't be allowed at the Athletes' Village near the starting line in Hopkinton or around the finish line on Boylston Street; neither will backpacks, glass containers, any container that can carry more than 1 liter of liquid, vests with pockets, or suitcases and rolling bags.

People will also be forbidden from wearing backpacks that carry water--such as CamelBaks. Props like sports and military equipment will be banned, as well as flags or signs that are wider than 11 inches and longer than 17 inches.

Bags, used in the past by runners to carry clothes and other personal items, will be banned on the buses that carry runners from Boston Common to Hopkinton, where the race starts. And no bags will be brought by those buses back to Boston.

Now, get out there and have fun, kids!

Seriously, people, we have to stop doing this. I'm fed up with the way this country reacts to tragedies. Each backlash is more over-the-top than the one before. These new marathon policies are so cartoonish, they could almost have come from the Onion. No bags? No strollers? No fucking pockets? At a free outdoor event? This has become a compulsion. We Americans like to act tough, pound our chests, congratulate ourselves on our ability to triumph over adversity. Well, this is not triumphing over adversity. This is cowering in a corner. If you have to keep talking about how strong and brave you are, you only show that you're weak and afraid.

It appears these particular rules were written by the Boston Athletic Association, the host of the marathon. The City of Boston was more circumspect:

Boston Police Department (BPD) will have an increased presence of uniformed and undercover officers along the marathon route.

Over 100 cameras have been installed along the Boston portion of the Marathon route, and upwards of 50 observation points will be set up around the finish line area in the Back Bay to monitor the crowd....

Spectators are encouraged to leave large items such as backpacks and strollers at home. These items are not banned; however, individuals may be subject to search.

(I'd lay odds that those "over 100 cameras" so helpfully installed along the route are a permanent fixture now. Exceptional circumstances become the new normal.)

I work in Boston, just a few blocks away from the marathon finish line, though I always have the day off for Patriots' Day, a state holiday. I also live in the suburbs less than five miles from the site of the notorious manhunt and shootout in Watertown. That week last year was surreal, to say the least. Since then, the news media has incessantly covered every detail of the bombing, but as far as I'm concerned, the case was solved within a week, the perpetrators were caught, and the threat is long over. What concerns me more now are the broader policy implications of what happened. Will we learn all the wrong lessons? It looks like the answer is yes.

It's a familiar pattern. I brace myself after every tragedy now, waiting for the backlash, the inevitable piling-on. Though he got a lot of flak for it at the time, I'll admit I agreed with David Sirota when he wrote that he hoped the bombers were white Americans. When white Americans shoot up schools, movie theaters, or military bases, public policy doesn't change--as much as most of us, including me, think it should. But acts of violence by foreign actors (or, as in this case, people perceived to be foreign actors, but who were, in fact, home-grown criminals) are always existential, a justification for drastic changes to the American "way of life." After the Newtown shooting, it was business as usual. After a terrorist attack by radical Muslims, the world is a fundamentally different place, the entire framework of civil society is undermined, and our Constitutional rights must be reconsidered. And it didn't take long. It was only a matter of hours after the bombing before Lindsey Graham was calling the Tsarnaevs "enemy combatants" and he and others were insisting Miranda didn't apply. I half expected to hear we'd be invading Chechnya.

As if the events of those days weren't bad enough, they were followed by the occupation of Boston by the U.S. military; 24-hour news coverage, speculation, and propaganda by ideologues; irrelevant debates on immigration; ridiculous outrage over a magazine cover as if it had magical powers; and general exploitation of the bombing, right alongside the attacks of 9/11, to justify suspicionless searches and mass surveillance of innocent Americans. Bostonians were expected to follow the latest breaking news, analyze each new development with friends and co-workers, participate in city-wide prayers (i.e., moments of silence), make a pilgrimage to the marathon finish line, and purchase "Boston Strong" gear. I can understand this kind of reaction from those personally affected by the bombing, but at a certain point the collective PTSD becomes pathological. The catharsis crosses the line into something almost cultish.

By way of comparison, consider this: Just nine days after the bombings, over 1,100 people were killed in a factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, and it barely registered as a blip in the American media. How many people die in Baghdad every day? Mogadishu? Of course, those places are far away. "How dare this happen to us?" is the subtext of Boston's outrage. So how about a statistic from closer to home? Over 30 people are shot and killed in America every day, and they are almost entirely ignored. We need a little perspective. We can't afford to let one crime paralyze us the way this one has.

The aim of terrorists is to terrorize. Fear makes people easy to manipulate, short-circuits their judgment, and leads them to act irrationally. So congratulations to the terrorists on their success, I guess.

Unfortunately, in this country, criticism of national security policy is too often characterized as callousness toward victims, in the same way criticism of military policy is characterized as insufficient support for the troops. All I propose is that we stop running around like headless chickens. Let's not give terrorists and criminals this kind of power over us. Let's not act as if, because of one bombing in the entire 117-year history of the Boston Marathon, attacks are now an inevitability and every public event is inherently dangerous. Let's not strip these events of everything that makes them fun. Let's not turn this country into a land of garrisons and checkpoints. Let's not treat civil liberties as if they're expendable. Let's give terrorists a great big finger to the sky by going on with our lives.

That would be something we could really be proud of.


Some articles from last year:
April 15, 2013 "The Boston bombing privacy lesson"
April 16, 2013 "After the bomb, mass hysteria is the Boston terrorist's greatest weapon"
April 16, 2013 "Eight facts about terrorism in the United States"
April 17, 2013 "How Not to Respond to the Boston Marathon Bombings"
April 17, 2013 "No, Fear of Terrorism is Not the 'New Normal'"
April 17, 2013 "As a Bostonian and Muslim, I wept Monday - and worried"
April 17, 2013 "The Saudi Marathon Man"
April 18, 2013 "When Fear Threatens Freedom"
April 19, 2013 "Manhunt Underway, Boston Under Lockdown"
April 19, 2013 "A Moment of Silence for Boston"
April 19, 2013 "Why Should I Care That No One's Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights?"
April 20, 2013 "ACLU: Denying Miranda rights to marathon bombing suspect is 'un-American'"
April 20, 2013 "Why does America lose its head over 'terror' but ignore its daily gun deaths?"
April 20, 2013 "America's willingness to be terrified by terrorism"
April 22, 2013 "Every time a bomb goes off, the surveillance state grows stronger"
April 22, 2013 "After Boston: The Banality of Shock and Sentiment"
April 22, 2013 "How Boston exposes the frailty of American democracy"
April 22, 2013 "Sorry, Lindsey Graham, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Is No 'Enemy Combatant'"
April 22, 2013 "After Boston: Don't Get Fooled Again by the 'War on Terror' Hawks"
April 23, 2013 "'Cape Fear,' and Our Fear"
April 23, 2013 "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has rights"
April 23, 2013 "Surveillance state no answer to terror"
April 23, 2013 "Boston bombing: FBI backlash 'risks turning US into surveillance state'"
April 24, 2013 "Will the Boston Bombings Kill the Public Police Scanner?"
April 25, 2013 "Mayor Bloomberg Is a Surveillance State Extremist, Not a Pragmatic Centrist"
April 26, 2013 "The Boston Bombing and Immigration"
April 29, 2013 "Let's show the world how it's done"
April 30, 2013 "The Burdens of Total Surveillance"
May 1, 2013 "The National Surveillance State 2.0"
May 2, 2013 "Boston and Beyond"
May 7, 2013 "Why Did They Clap for the Police?"

Stop Watching Us

This is the day we fight back.

Recommended Reading

November 2013 "Medical, Military, and Ethics Experts Say Health Professionals Designed and Participated in Cruel, Inhumane, and Degrading Treatment and Torture of Detainees; Seek Policies to Assure Conformance with Ethical Principles"
November 1, 2013 "UK: Snowden reporter's partner involved in 'espionage' and 'terrorism'"
November 1, 2013 "What's Bugging the Head of the NSA?"
November 4, 2013 "NSA official cites 'stop and frisk' in effort to explain searches of phone records"
November 5, 2013 "6 Months After Obama Promised to Divulge More on Drones, Here's What We Still Don't Know"
November 5, 2013 "Orwell's '1984' has nothing on the current surveillance state"
November 6, 2013 "FBI monitored anti-war website in error for six years, documents show"
November 7, 2013 "C.I.A. Is Said to Pay AT&T for Call Data"
November 7, 2013 "Forget the Back Door: the Government Now Wants the Keys to the Internet"
November 8, 2013 "Rep. Alan Grayson Asks Eric Holder If US Citizen Glenn Greenwald Will Actually Be Allowed Back Into the US Without Arrest"
November 8, 2013 "Feinstein's NSA bill shows she doesn't have a clue about intelligence reform"
November 8, 2013 "A Fraying of the Public/Private Surveillance Partnership"
November 9, 2013 "How to Protect Your Phone from the Police"
November 10, 2013 "What we all need to know about surveillance in America"
November 11, 2013 "NSA leadership shakeup would mean squat"
November 12, 2013 "The Big Question the National Security State Isn't Asking"
November 12, 2013 "Mistaking Omniscience for Omnipotence: In a World Without Privacy, There Are No Exemptions for Our Spies"
November 13, 2013 "Why Does Anyone Trust the National-Security State?"
November 13, 2013 "Today is Guantanamo's 12th anniversary, and there's no end in sight"
November 13, 2013 "Supreme Court appears to support a warrantless police search"
November 13, 2013 "Meet the Punk Rocker Who Can Liberate Your FBI File"
November 13, 2013 "Homeland and the Imagination of National Security"
November 14, 2013 "Stop-and-frisk: only 3% of 2.4m stops result in conviction, report finds"
November 14, 2013 "Police tried to spy on Cambridge students, secret footage shows"
November 18, 2013 "How an Unfalsifiable Counterterrorism Strategy Makes Us Less Safe"
November 18, 2013 "Supreme Court Rejects Case Challenging NSA Phone Spying"
November 20, 2013 "Newly Released Documents Show How Government Inflated the Definition of Metadata"
November 20, 2013 "New Snowden-Inspired Ad Campaign Shows America's Fear of Domestic Terrorism Is Unfounded"
November 20, 2013 "Next Stop on the Road to Surveillance State: License Plate Scanners"
November 22, 2013 "Twitter Just Made It Harder for the NSA to Read Your Private Tweets"
November 25, 2013 "Obama's overhaul of spy programs cloaked in more secrecy"
November 26, 2013 "Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied on Porn Habits as Part of Plan to Discredit 'Radicalizers'"
November 27, 2013 "23andMe Is Terrifying, but Not for the Reasons the FDA Thinks"
November 30, 2013 "Who Is Watching the Watch Lists?"
December 1, 2013 "A New TSA Harassment Coming: Searches to Leave the Airport"
December 2, 2013 "Feinstein and Rogers Try to Scare Americans with Ooga Booga Terrorism Threats"
December 3, 2013 "EFF Amicus Brief: Video Surveillance of a Home for a Month Without a Warrant Violates Fourth Amendment"
December 3, 2013 "Welcome to the Memory Hole: Disappearing Edward Snowden"
December 3, 2013 "Science Play and Research Kit: Foil the NSA With Chemistry"
December 4, 2013 "NSA Is Tracking Mobile Phone Location on So Many People It Can't Handle the Data Storage"
December 4, 2013 "The NSA says it 'obviously' can track locations without a warrant. That's not so obvious."
December 4, 2013 "Case Over No-Fly List Takes Bizarre Turn as Gov't Puts Witness on List, Then Denies Having Done So"
December 5, 2013 "A Reasonable Expectation of Transparency: Dave Eggers's The Circle"
December 7, 2013 "The specter of global domination"
December 7, 2013 "DOJ Argues Unlawfully Obtained Evidence Still Valid"
December 8, 2013 "The Over-Policing of America: Police Overkill Has Entered the DNA of Social Policy"
December 9, 2013 "The NSA Has Been Spying on World of Warcraft"
December 9, 2013 "Intelligence contractors donate millions to intelligence watchdogs in Congress"   
December 10, 2013 "Goliath vs. Goliath: Why tech giants can't break the surveillance state"
December 11, 2013 "In Today's News: Bridling the Surveillance State"
December 11, 2013 "How Americans Were Deceived About Cell-Phone Location Data"
December 13, 2013 "The 6,000-Page Report on CIA Torture Has Now Been Suppressed for 1 Year"
December 13, 2013 "NSA review to leave spying programs largely unchanged, reports say"
December 16. 2013 "Judge: NSA's collecting of phone records is probably unconstitutional"
December 16, 2013 "Judge Finds NSA Phone Metadata Program Infringes Upon Privacy & Vindicates Edward Snowden"
December 16, 2013 "NSA goes on 60 Minutes: the definitive facts behind CBS's flawed report"
December 17, 2013 "Inside the Stunning Court Smackdown on NSA Spying"
December 17, 2013 "Awards they couldn't accept: The tragic irony of Greenwald, Poitras and Snowden"
December 18, 2013 "The NSA on Trial"
December 18, 2013 "Forty-Six Recommendations for the N.S.A."
December 19, 2013 "Government Requests to Remove Online Material Increase at Google"
December 20, 2013 "Dire Civil Liberties Predictions for 2014"
December 20, 2013 "What to Expect From Surveillance Politics in 2014 (Hint: It's Not Reform)"
December 20, 2013 "GCHQ and NSA targeted charities, Germans, Israeli PM and EU chief"
December 20, 2013 "Insight: How U.S. spying cost Boeing multibillion-dollar jet contract"
December 22, 2013 "Activists demand answers, changes to current border drug search policies"
December 23, 2013 "Landmark Decision Important Beyond NSA Phone Records Collection"
December 23, 2013 "The War on Terror's Jedi Mind Trick"
December 25, 2013 "If not the NSA, who should store the phone data?"
December 27, 2013 "Judge: NSA phone surveillance is legal and a 'vital tool'"
December 27, 2013 "Civil Rights Groups Push to Change Legality of Border Body Cavity Drug Searches"
December 31, 2013 "Judge Dismisses ACLU Lawsuit Over Suspicionless Laptop Searches at Border"
December 31, 2013 "Feds Cleared on Search of Flashcard-Carrying Man"
December 31, 2013 "Washington Post Columnist Says 'Complainers' Will Be at Fault for Next Terrorist Attack"
January 2, 2014 "Cost-Benefit Analysis on Why We Should Just Do Away With the TSA Completely"
January 3, 2014 "Judge rules against drug-testing program for welfare applicants"
January 3, 2014 "Man Stopped by Cops for Supposedly Voluntary NHTSA 'Survey' Sues City and Police Dept. for Violating His 4th Amendment Rights"