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'"
Saturday, April 26, 2014
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?"
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"
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"
Monday, April 21, 2014
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:
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:
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?"
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.Now, get out there and have fun, kids!
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.
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.(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.)
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 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?"
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