Surveillance

By Tom Engelhardt via Tomdispatch Internet Class of 2014, I’m in awe of you! To this giant, darkened auditorium filled with sparkling screens of every sort, welcome! It would, of course, be inaccurate to say, as speakers like me once did, that after four years of effort and experience you are now about to leave […]

Bill of Rights

Mr. Kerry: Why Snowden can’t “Make his Case” in “Our System of Justice”

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole Secretary of State John Kerry said that Edward Snowden should “return home and come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case.” Kerry seems to have a high opinion of the Department of Justice and the US courts when it comes to national security issues. I can’t […]

Democracy

Press Freedom is the Issue, not Glenn Greenwald’s Personality

contributors

By Barry Eisler via Freedom of the Press Foundation: One of the most fascinating aspects of Glenn Greenwald’s journalism is the way it provokes various people who think of themselves as journalists to reveal their actual priorities. I wrote about this at length last week in a response to Michael Kinsley’s non-review review of Greenwald’s […]

Crime

Not Snowden but Keith Alexander: Hero or Traitor (the debate we should be having)

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole NBC News’s Brian Williams interviewed Edward Snowden in Moscow on Wednesday night. But then Mr. Williams followed it up with a panel discussion of whether Snowden is a hero or traitor. It was a cowardly and venal thing to do, and Mr. Williams should be ashamed of himself. By framing the post-interview […]

China

The NSA Effect: China tells its banks to remove IBM servers as Spyware

contributors

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT has urged its banks to stop using servers built by IBM because it believes that they might be used for espionage. According to unnamed sources cited by Bloomberg, the People’s Bank of China and the Chinese Ministry of Finance…

Constitution

‘Journalist’ Michael Kinsley says Gov’t should make Publishing Decisions

contributors

Glenn Greenwald spends the last third of his excellent new book, “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State”, exposing the mentality and function of pseudo-journalists like David Gregory, who are in fact better understood…

Bill of Rights

House Passes Fake USA Freedom Act; Only hope is Senate

contributors

As explained earlier, due to pressure from the White House and NSA’s supporters in Congress, what could have been real NSA reform was completely changed at the last minute, in secret. The bill, which was substantially different than what both the Judiciary…

Domestic Surveillance

Greenwald: NSA sneaking backdoors into hardware exports

Juan Cole

Glenn Greenwald has accused the US National Security Agency (NSA) of inserting backdoors for surveillance purposes into servers being exported to other countries. The irony here is that this is just the sort of thing that the US government has in the…

Domestic Surveillance

When Greenwald met Snowden: “Spark a … movement against the dangers of state surveillance”

Juan Cole

(By Glenn Greenwald via Tomdispatch) [This essay is a shortened and adapted version of Chapter 1 of Glenn Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Security State, and appears at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of Metropolitan Books.] On December 1, 2012, I received my first communication from […]