Dissent

By Shachar Pinsker This is a rather long and not very happy post. You wouldn’t find here much that is new in terms of facts or even analysis of what’s going on in Israel/Palestine. It’s just a personal account of, and some reflections on one eventful night around here. If you are reading it, please […]

American Jews

Quashing Jewish Dissent on Israel

contributors

By Shalom Goldman A New Yorker cartoon of a few years back shows Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. Looking at Moses, one Israelite says to the other, “Well, he’s alright, but I wish he were a little more pro-Israel.” The leadership of American Jewish community organizations never has to worry about such […]

Bill of Rights

Helpless Giant: How Imperial US Elites Tied America Down All by Themselves

Tom Engelhardt

By Tom Engelhardt via Tomdispatch For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does — torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it — will ever be brought to court. For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable. The only crimes that can now be committed in […]

Bill of Rights

NSA Spying: Now It’s Personal

contributors

By Eva Galperin and Nadia Kayyali via EFF Imagine that you watched a police officer in your neighborhood stop ten completely ordinary people every day just to take a look inside their vehicle or backpack. Now imagine that nine of those people are never even accused of a crime. They just happened to be in […]

Dissent

Escaping Mosul and ISIS Assassination Campaigns

contributors

niqash | Special Correspondent | Mosul | Refugees from the Ninawa province, of whihc Mosul is the capital, queue to get into Iraqi Kurdistan. One local journalist explains why streets in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul are so quiet, what’s worrying his family and friends there the most and how he himself managed to […]

Democracy

90% of NSA Data from non-Targets, 1/2 accounts had info on US Citizens

contributors

By Jon Queally Washington Post reveals unprecedented look at how 'voyeuristic' spy agency manages private communications it collects New reporting by the Washington Post based on materials leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals an unprecedented view of how the private information of millions of "ordinary people" are caught up in the spy agency's massive […]

Barack Obama

If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance

contributors

By Cory Doctorow via Boing Boing In a shocking story on the German site Tagesschau (Google translate), Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz report on the rules used by the NSA to decide who is a “target” for surveillance. Since the start of the Snowden story in 2013, the NSA has stressed that while […]

Dissent

Not War on Poverty but War on the Poor: Washington’s Real Foreign Policy Aims

Juan Cole

By Noam Chomsky via Tomdispatch The question of how foreign policy is determined is a crucial one in world affairs. In these comments, I can only provide a few hints as to how I think the subject can be productively explored, keeping to the United States for several reasons. First, the U.S. is unmatched in […]

Bill of Rights

Police: No Searching Journalists’ Cellphones w/out a Warrant, Either (SCOTUS Decision)

contributors

By Josh Stearns According to the Supreme Court, police need a warrant to search the cellphones of people they arrest. The unanimous decision, which was handed down this week, is being heralded as a major victory for privacy rights and a landmark case with implications far beyond cellphones. The New York Times reports, “The ruling […]