US politics

Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com The Making of a Global Security State As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we’ve come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 — waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, […]

Democracy Now! interviews Susan Landau, mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer, author of the book Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies. Excerpt from the transcript: “This may surprise many people, this point that metadata—just, you know, the fact of a phone call, who you called, perhaps where you made the call—can […]

Sen. Rand Paul pushes back against the National Security Agency and its massive surveillance of telephone records, in an interview with Jake Tapper of CNN. He pledges to introduce legislation forbidding “generalized warrants,” which he believes are already unconstitutional. He also contrasted the less than truthful testimony before Congress of the Director of National Intelligence […]

The Dictator: Imagine if America was a dictatorship:

Edward Snowden said that he stepped forward because he came to realize that the US government is engaged in invasions of Americans’ privacy on a vast and unprecedented scale, and was hiding its interpretation of the law from the American people. Given that the NSA is contravening the 4th amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and […]

Here are part 1 and part 2 of Michael Brooks’s interview of me on Sam Seder’s Majority Report on Monday. Part 1: and Part 2:

The Second Amendment to the Constitution is interpreted by lawmakers and judges in an absolute manner. Every American, we are constantly told– even mentally ill ones like the shooter at Santa Monica College who killed 6 persons on Friday, hunting our children as though they were wild game– has the right to stockpile semi-automatic weapons […]