International Politics and Economy

(By Michael Masnick) FISA Court Waited Until After Snowden Leaks To Actually Explore If Bulk Phone Record Collection Was Legal (via Techdirt) One of the most common defenses of the NSA’s bulk phone record collection (in which they get access to the record of basically every phone call in the US) is that the program […]

Arab Spring

54 Dead in an Egypt Polarized between pro-Military, anti-Coup on Revolution Anniversary

Juan Cole

(by Juan Cole) January 25 marked the third anniversary of the revolution that overthrew dictator Hosni Mubarak, and Egyptians observed it in three distinctively different ways. In the iconic Tahrir Square downtown, thousands of supporters of the military coup of July 3, 2013, gathered for a big party. People never used to dance to patriotic […]

Arab Spring

3 Years Later, Young Bloggers who made the Tahrir Revolution are in Jail

contributors

The military “interim government” in Egypt is cracking down on virtually all meaningful form of assembly, association, or opposition. Following the passage of a November 2013 law banning peaceful protest, dozens of activists and organizers have…

Drones

Death toll of Obama’s Drone Campaign 5 Years Later: 2,400

contributors

(By Jack Serle) Obama has launched over 390 covert drone strikes in his first five years in office Five years ago, on January 23 2009, a CIA drone flattened a house in Pakistan’s tribal regions. It was the third day of Barack Obama’s presidency, and this was the new commander-in-chief’s first covert drone strike. Initial […]

Dissent

Egyptian Professor Defends Himself from Coup Gov’t’s McCarthyite “Grand Espionage” Charges

contributors

(By Emad Shahin) Statement to my Students, Family and Friends January 23, 2014 It was with severe shock that I received news that I have been named in a case known as the “Grand Espionage,” which also included former President Mohamed Morsi and senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. These claims are baseless and politically […]

Dissent

NSA Surveillance is about Control & Leverage, not Security

contributors

By Alfred McCoy | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of […]

Dissent

Gov’t used Surveillance of MLK in Bid to Destroy Him: Now they want us to just Trust Them

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) Among the ironies of Barack Obama trying to sell us the gargantuan NSA domestic spying program is that such techniques of telephone surveillance were used against the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in an attempt to destroy him and stop the Civil Rights movement. Had the republic’s most notorious peeping tom, J. […]

Dissent

US Intel Officials keep Talking about Killing Snowden, then say “trust us with your data”

contributors

(By Mike Masnick) The Fact That The US Intelligence Community So Readily Admits To Fantasies Of Killing Ed Snowden Shows Why They Can’t Be Trusted (via Techdirt) We’ve mentioned things in the past like former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden “jokingly” talking about how he’d like to put Ed Snowden on a “kill list” […]

Egypt

The Shame and the Danger of Egypt’s 98% Vote

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) The announcement on Saturday by the Egyptian government that there was a 38% turnout for the referendum on the new constitution was unexceptional. It was more than the 33% that turned out to vote on the Muslim Brotherhood constitution of 2012, but not that much more. But the declaration that the constitution […]