Government surveillance

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The hysteria about Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee servers and the phishing scam run on Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is short on evidence and high in self-righteousness. Much of the report issued Friday was old boilerplate about […]

Bill of Rights

Bruited Trump pick for Nat’l Intel shreds 4th Amendment, wants Total Surveillance

contributors

TeleSur | – – On Thursday multiple mainstream media outlets reported that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has picked former Republican Senator Dan Coats, an outspoken advocate of illegal domestic surveillance programs, to be director of national intelligence. While yet to be formally announced, anonymous Trump transition team members told multiple outlets that the pick would […]

Donald Trump

Circus of Liars: How Trump & GOP are Twisted into Pretzels over Putin Hack

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Donald J. Trump has picked another fight with the elders of his own Republican Party, over whether Russia engaged in hacking aimed at influencing the US election. Trump has maintained that it is impossible to trace hacking attempts, that it isn’t clear who was behind them, […]

Government surveillance

Russia Vows Response to ‘Aggressive’ Obama Sanctions

contributors

TeleSur | – – The Russian diplomats will have 72 hours to leave the United States. The United States’ new sanctions against Russia prove the foreign policy of the Obama administration is “aggressive,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin press-secretary, said Thursday, as the Kremlin indicated retaliatory measures against Washington. “In our point of view such actions […]

Government surveillance

NSA again hacked by own Contractor, but wants us to trust them with our Data

contributors

TeleSur | – – “I thought the Third World War had started,” the man’s neighbor described the raid and arrest in August. A National Security Agency (NSA) contractor has been arrested and charged with stealing highly classified information, U.S. authorities said Wednesday, a data breach that could result in a damaging new leak about the […]

Corporate Surveillance

Yahoo helped in unconstitutional US Gov. mass Surveillance of Americans’ Email

contributors

By Andrew Crocker and Mark Rumold | (Electronic Frontier Foundation) | – – In a bombshell published today, Reuters is reporting that, in 2015, Yahoo complied with an order it received from the U.S. government to search all of its users’ incoming emails, in real time. There’s still much that we don’t know at this […]

Domestic Surveillance

Feds: We can read all your email, and you’ll never know

contributors

By Clark D. Cunningham | (The Conversation) | – – Fear of hackers reading private emails in cloud-based systems like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo has recently sent regular people and public officials scrambling to delete entire accounts full of messages dating back years. What we don’t expect is our own government to hack our […]

Bill of Rights

Making Case for Pardon, Snowden Says Leaks Were ‘Necessary, Vital Things’

contributors

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer | (Commondreams.org) | – – ‘I think when people look at the calculations of benefit, it is clear that in the wake of 2013 the laws of our nation changed,’ Snowden tells the Guardian In a new interview with the Guardian, whistleblower Edward Snowden explains why U.S. President Barack Obama […]

Featured

15 Years after 9/11, can we Recover our Republic?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The Founding Fathers thought keeping a standing army was a danger to democracy. The great wars of the twentieth century appear to have imbued the United States with a permanent standing army, and this institution has been reinforced by the September 11 attacks. Or rather it […]