National Security Agency

By Mark Jaycox | (Electronic Frontier Foundation) | – The House passed two cybersecurity “information sharing” bills today: the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s Protecting Cyber Networks Act, and the House Homeland Security Committee’s National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement Act. Both bills will be “conferenced” to create one bill and then sent to the Senate […]

FBI

A Letter of Apology to My Grandson: A Pox on Twenty-First-Century America

contributors

By Tom Engelhardt | ( Tomdispatch.com) Dear Grandson, Consider my address book — and yes, the simple fact that I have one already tells you a good deal about me. All the names, street addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers that matter to me are still on paper, not in a computer or on an […]

Bill of Rights

Top 5 Signs of the Decline and Fall of the American Republic

contributors

By Tom Engelhardt | (Tomdispatch.com) Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching […]

Barack Obama

War on Whistleblowers (ft. Edward Snowden & David Carr)

contributors

Brave New Films | – Brave New Films: War on Whistleblowers (ft. Edward Snowden & David Carr) War on Whistleblowers highlights recent cases where American government employees and contractors took to the media to expose fraud and abuse. In all cases the whistle-blowing was to the detriment of their professional and personal lives. With President […]

Domestic Surveillance

‘I would have come forward sooner’ – Snowden on NSA leak regrets

contributors

RT | – Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has frequently said that he does not regret blowing the whistle on the agency’s mass surveillance programs. However, he has now stated that he would change one thing if he could do it all again. He would have leaked the information earlier. Snowden made the […]

African-Americans

In New Gilded Age, Social Protest dominates Academy Awards Ceremony

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – If social and economic inequality were a mine, and if America were deep in this mine with a canary in tow, the canary would long since have expired. Some 400 billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of Americans. We lived through a year of dramatic incidents […]

Corporate Surveillance

Not your Founding Fathers’ America: Permanent War, Permanent Election Campaigns, Guns, Drones and Surveillance

Tom Engelhardt

By Tom Engelhardt | (Tomdispatch.com) I never fail to be amazed — and that’s undoubtedly my failing. I mean, if you retain a capacity for wonder you can still be awed by a sunset, but should you really be shocked that the sun is once again sinking in the west? Maybe not. The occasion for […]

Crime

NSA making all vulnerable online with Equation Viruses on your Computer

contributors

TheLipTV | – “Malware in hard drive firmware is the latest, and most sophisticated spying tool the NSA is suspected of using, with Kaspersky Labs of Russia suggesting that the “Equation Group” of hackers have infiltrated the innermost workings of computers dating back to 2001. The “Equation Group,” have long been suspected of being intimately […]

Bill of Rights

Is the NSA Responsible for N. Korea’s Hack of Sony Pictures?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | — In all the discussions of what is alleged to be North Korea’s horrible cyber-vandalism against Sony Pictures, I haven’t seen anyone bring up a key issue: The National Security Agency has been for two decades a powerful behind-the-scenes lobby for weak internet encryption and privacy protocols. I don’t know enough […]