US politics

This is the “gallery filibuster” — shouting by pro-choice advocates in the Senate halls after Democratic Sen. Wendy Davis’s filibuster was shut down– that so delayed the vote on a proposed law virtually banning abortion in Texas that it took place too late to be valid. Video of the ‘Gallery filibuster: After a marathon filibuster […]

Domestic Surveillance

Top Ten Ways US TV News are Screwing us Again on NSA Surveillance Story (Iraq Redux)

Juan Cole

US television news is a danger to the security of the United States. First, it is so oriented to ratings that it cannot afford to do unpopular reports (thus, it ignored al-Qaeda and the Taliban for the most part before 9/11). Second, it is so oriented toward the halls of power inside the Beltway that […]

Domestic Surveillance

Top Ten American Steps toward a Police State

Juan Cole

The police state, a term first coined in the mid-19th century in German (Polizeistaat), is characterized by a standing political police, by intense domestic surveillance and by restrictions on the movements of citizens. Police states are on a spectrum, and unfortunately in the past decade the Unite States has moved toward police-stateness in small but […]

Syria

Obama’s New Syria Strategy is Nixon’s Vietnam Negotiation Tactics Redux (Meyer)

Juan Cole

Carlyn Meyer writes in a guest column for Informed Comment For better or worse, Obama came of age well after the Vietnam war. Had he lived through the daily body counts, he may have stood strong against arming the Syrian opposition. The President’s new ‘strategy’ is to get enough arms to the ‘right people’ in […]

al-Qaeda

Why the 9/11 Argument for NSA Spying Fails: They Tracked, Lost their Suspect (Elliott)

Juan Cole

Justin Elliott writes at ProPublica In defending the NSA’s sweeping collection of Americans’ phone call records, Obama administration officials have repeatedly pointed out how it could have helped thwart the 9/11 attacks: If only the surveillance program been in place before Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. authorities would have been able to identify one of the […]

CIA

Syria, NSA Spying, Popular Mobilization and History: Cole Interview in La Prensa (Ricky Martinez)

Juan Cole

Interview with Juan Cole by Ricky Martínez (These are the English notes of the interview rearranged in pyramid form; they were translated and published in a different sequence in Spanish at La Prensa of Panama City). Many thanks to Mr. Martinez for a wide-ranging conversation! RM: How is Syria different from Libya? Syria is different […]

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)

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 […]