Surveillance

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU, among other important civil society organizations, are suing the Federal government over the National Security Agency’s unconstitutional domestic surveillance. The administration is also facing House hearings on the issue. By the way, the argument made by Homeland Security and other such officials that the NSA’s domestic spying could […]

Domestic Surveillance

The End of Dissidents: The National Security State wants a World without Thoreaus (Engelhardt)

Juan Cole

Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com It’s hard even to know how to take it in. I mean, what’s really happening? An employee of a private contractor working for the National Security Agency makes off with unknown numbers of files about America’s developing global security state on a thumb drive and four laptop computers, and jumps the nearest plane to Hong […]

Domestic Surveillance

Obama Explains his NSA Domestic Spying & Why it differs from Bush’s (Cartoon satire)

Juan Cole

Cartoon satire: “President Obama explains why Americans should not be concerned about the NSA’s secret data collection program and that he is very different from George W. Bush.” The video is here:

Domestic Surveillance

A Century of America’s Imperial Deep State (McCoy)

Juan Cole

Alfred W. McCoy writes at Tomdispatch.com The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly monitor […]

Domestic Surveillance

UK’s Channel 4 Schools US Media on How to cover NSA, Snowden

Juan Cole

This report by Channel 4 News in the UK, covering Edward Snowden’s application for asylum in the Russian Federation and his revelations of collaboration between Microsoft and the National Security Agency struck me as everything that US “news” coverage is not. The reporters don’t just parrot the Washington line. They point out that the transit […]

Domestic Surveillance

In Chilling Ruling, Chevron is Granted Access to Amazon Activists’ Private Emails

Juan Cole

"Sweeping" subpoena violates rights of those who spoke out against oil giant's devastating actions in Ecuador – Lauren McCauley writes at Commondreams “Following their guilty sentence for the dumping of 18.5bn gallons of toxic waste in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Chevron is amassing the personal information of the environmentalists and attorneys who fought against them in […]

Government surveillance

Argentina’s President Kirchner: US Industrial Espionage gave me Chills down my Spine

Juan Cole

The relationship between the United States and Latin America may have just plunged to its lowest level since the 1910s and 1920s, the height of US imperialism in the area, when United Fruit and the Marines imposed themselves on the region. Glenn Greenwald, Roberto Kaz and José Casado revealed in an article for the Brazilian […]

al-Qaeda

FBI Discriminates Against American Muslims & lets White Terrorists Off the Hook (Harwood)

Juan Cole

Matthew Harwood writes at Tomdispatch: The evangelical Christians of Greenville County, South Carolina, are afraid. There has been talk of informants and undercover agents luring young, conservative evangelicals across the South into sham terrorist plots. The feds and the area’s police want to eliminate a particularly extreme strain of evangelical Christianity opposed to abortion, homosexuality, […]

Domestic Surveillance

Snowden: I acted because Domestic Spying actually worsened under Obama

Juan Cole

The Guardian has released part two of the Hong Kong interview with Edward Snowden, in which he clarifies his reasons for going public. He talks about how the warrantless demand for Verizon phone records was the misuse of a USA Patriot Act provision intended to allow monitoring of an individual, but which was applied to […]