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US politics

Domestic Surveillance

PATRIOT Act Drafters worried about Library Privacy, had No Idea everyone’s Phone Records would be Dragooned (Elliott)

Juan Cole

Justin Elliott writes at ProPublica In the months following the October 2001, passage of the Patriot Act, there was a heated public debate about the very provision of the law that we now know the government is using to vacuum up phone records of American citizens on a massive scale. “A chilling intrusion” declared one […]

US politics
Top 5 Temptations the Surveillance State Can’t Resist (Engelhardt)

Top 5 Temptations the Surveillance State Can’t Resist (Engelhardt)

Juan Cole

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, […]

US politics

Who you Call is Far more Revealing than what you Say: Landau on Gov’t Spying (Democracy Now!)

Juan Cole

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 […]

al-Qaeda

NSA Leads come from others’ police work, not from data mining: the case of Headley (Rotella)

Juan Cole

Sebastian Rotella writes at ProPublica June 12: This story has been updated with NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander’s Senate testimony on surveillance. Defending a vast program to sweep up phone and Internet data under antiterror laws, senior U.S. officials in recent days have cited the case of David Coleman Headley, a key plotter in the […]

US politics
Sen. Rand Paul:  Snowden’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ seeks “to defend the Fourth Amendment”

Sen. Rand Paul: Snowden’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ seeks “to defend the Fourth Amendment”

Juan Cole

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 […]

Afghanistan
The Government Endangered us with Foreign Quagmires; it’s the Bradley Mannings that might keep us safe (Madar)

The Government Endangered us with Foreign Quagmires; it’s the Bradley Mannings that might keep us safe (Madar)

Juan Cole

Chase Madar writes at Tomdispatch.com The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ source inside the U.S. Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden.  The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity is secret) is expected to tell […]

US politics
The Dictator: Imagine if America was a Dictatorship (Video)

The Dictator: Imagine if America was a Dictatorship (Video)

Juan Cole

The Dictator: Imagine if America was a dictatorship:

US politics

Top Ten Ways the US Government will Smear, Slight Whistleblower Edward Snowden

Juan Cole

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 […]

US politics
Turning the Tables on the Surveillance Class (Cole on Majority Report)

Turning the Tables on the Surveillance Class (Cole on Majority Report)

Juan Cole

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:

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