Thanks to more documents leaked by Edward Snowden, this time to the Washington Post, we learned last week that a secret May 2012 internal audit by the NSA revealed 2,776 incidents of “unauthorized” collection of information on American citizens over the previous 12...
Though it made for sensational headlines last week, the 2,776 NSA violations of its own intercept guidelines over the course of one year are irrelevant. The millions and millions of “authorized” intercepts of our communications are all illegal -- except for the very...
Most Americans are probably unaware that over the past two weeks the US has launched at least eight drone attacks in Yemen, in which dozens have been killed. It is the largest US escalation of attacks on Yemen in more than a decade. The US claims that everyone killed...
In 2001, the Patriot Act opened the door to US government monitoring of Americans without a warrant. It was unconstitutional, but most in Congress over my strong objection were so determined to do something after the attacks of 9/11 that they did not seem to give it...
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers and many other defenders of the NSA spying program warned critics that the mass collection of our electronic communications had already stopped “dozens” of terrorist plots against the United States. In June, NSA...
Last week’s House debate on the Defense Appropriations bill for 2014 produced a bit more drama than usual. After hearing that House leadership would do away with the traditional “open rule” allowing for debate on any funding limitation amendment, it was surprising to...
Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) November 19, 2002Congress spent just a few short hours last week voting to create the biggest new federal bureaucracy since World War II, not that the media or even most members of Congress paid much attention to the process. Yet our most basic...
In a Washington Post profile today, we read that NSA Director Keith Alexander’s “passion” to protect us from terrorist threats led him to “collect it all,” meaning to intercept and store our every electronic interaction. According to the Post, Alexander used the...
Looking at the banners in the massive Egyptian protests last week, we saw many anti-American slogans. Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood-led government that was deposed by the military last week was very critical of what it saw as US support for the coup. Why is it that...
A military coup in Egypt yesterday resulted in the removal and imprisonment of the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a closure of media outlets sympathetic to him, the house arrest of his advisors, and the suspension of the constitution. The military that overthrew...
From massive NSA spying, to IRS targeting of the administration's political opponents, to collection and sharing of our health care information as part of Obamacare, it seems every day we learn of another assault on our privacy. Sadly, this week the Senate took...
I am reading the heartbreaking suicide note of Daniel Somers, a US combat veteran who spent several years fighting in Iraq. Mr. Somers was only 30 years old when he took his own life, after being tormented by the horrific memories of what he experienced in Iraq. He...
Last week the Taliban opened an office in Doha, Qatar with the US government’s blessing. They raised the Taliban flag at the opening ceremony and referred to Afghanistan as the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan"—the name they used when they were in charge before the US...
Today we learned from the Guardian newspaper that Federal judges and Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on an NSA request to make use of information it “inadvertently” collected on Americans without a warrant. According to the paper, the NSA was given permission...
Remember the Sequester? Remember the Administration threatening the end of the world if the phony “cuts” (which were actually just decreases in future spending increases) came into effect? Remember the cuts to Air Traffic Controllers while we were told “good luck” on...
President Obama announced late last week that the US intelligence community had just determined that the Syrian government had used poison gas on a small scale, killing some 100 people in a civil conflict that has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. Because of this...
The Obama Administration’s sudden announcement last night that it has discovered the Syrian government used chemical weapons and thus crossed the “red line” is pretty unconvincing. The Administration provided no evidence, no new information, and no explanation of why...
Foreign Policy magazine’s website featured an interesting article yesterday on the ongoing protests in Turkey. The protests have been covered quite a bit in the media over the past couple of weeks, as they spread throughout the country, were met with violence by the...
Last week we saw dramatic new evidence of illegal government surveillance of our telephone calls, and of the National Security Agency’s deep penetration into American companies such as Facebook and Microsoft to spy on us. The media seemed shocked. Many of us are not...
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