Surveillance

The Snowden revelations that the National Security Agency was scooping up hundreds of millions of American cell phone records that show who they call and where they are was met with a big yawn in official Washington, D.C. If you are a feudal lord, you want to know what the peasants are up to. The […]

Government surveillance

America’s Secret 4th Branch of Government: The NSA kept even Obama in the Dark

Juan Cole

The revelation from the Snowden Papers that the National Security Agency had German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal cell phone under surveillance has produced a central fallout. Dueling leaks over the international embarrassment have forced the White House to a key admission: President Barack Obama did not know what the NSA was up to. Ever since […]

CIA

How the US Government Betrayed the Constitution and invented an Imaginary Fascist One

Juan Cole

The idea of having a strong Federal government was controversial in the early United States, and one of the ways Federalists reassured Americans that it wouldn’t become tyrannical was to append a Bill of Rights to the Constitution. That attempt to prevent despotism has failed, because the Federal government and its various agencies have set […]

Domestic Surveillance

No, NSA snooping didn’t foil 50 Terrorist Attacks (Elliot & Meyer)

Juan Cole

Claim on “Attacks Thwarted” by NSA Spreads Despite Lack of Evidence Justin Elliot and Theodoric Meyer write at ProPublica Two weeks after Edward Snowden’s first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, […]

Domestic Surveillance

Snowden: Federal Spying makes us Less Secure

Juan Cole

Supporters of massive National Security Agency domestic and international electronic surveillance of millions of innocent civilians justify it on the grounds that it makes us safer. It does not. Edward Snowden makes the opposite point, which is that intense government surveillance harms our security. He revealed the secret warrantless monitoring of Americans (which goes beyond […]

Domestic Surveillance

Big Brother’s little Brothers: How Surveillance Companies Mine your Info for the Gov’t (Chatterjee)

Juan Cole

Pratap Chatterjee writes at Tomdispatch.com The Data Hackers Mining Your Information for Big Brother By Pratap Chatterjee Big Bro is watching you. Inside your mobile phone and hidden behind your web browser are little known software products marketed by contractors to the government that can follow you around anywhere. No longer the wide-eyed fantasies of […]

Afghanistan

Top Ten Things Ted Cruz did to the NSA and other Security Agencies that Edward Snowden Couldn’t

Juan Cole

Edward Snowden’s revelations about the excesses of the National Security Agency have so far had no effect whatsoever on actual practices. But Ted Cruz’s conspiracy to shut down the American government as a bargaining ploy in his quest to stop the working poor from being able to see a doctor has been much more effective […]

Government surveillance

President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil at UN delivers Stinging Rebuke to Obama on NSA Spying (Lazare)

Juan Cole

Reuters reports on President Roussef’s speech condemning US spying on her country and on her personally: Sarah Lazare writes at Commondreams: In a furious critique that opened the UN's General Assembly meeting Tuesday immediately before President Obama took the podium, Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff blasted U.S. secret surveillance programs for violating her country's national sovereignty, […]

Domestic Surveillance

Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ Was less Intrusive than our own Feds & We OK’d That (Calabrese and Harwood)

Juan Cole

Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood write at Tomdispatch.com For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with […]