Edward Snowden, the admitted U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower, is charged with violations of the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917, codified under Chapter 37, “Espionage and Censorship.” It is seemingly not an oversight that Chapter 37 is entitled “Espionage and Censorship,” as censorship is the effect, in part, of this chapter.In fact, the amendment of §793 that added subsection (e) was part of the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, which was, in turn, Title I of the Internal...

No sooner than the United Nations chemical weapons inspectors arrived in Damascus – within 72 hours, in fact – the Syrian opposition figures based in Istanbul, Turkey, have claimed that up to 1400 people have been killed in chemical weapons attacks by the government forces on the outskirts of the Syrian capital on Wednesday morning. The United States, Britain, France, Germany, the European Union and the Arab League are among those who have demanded for urgent action. Unsurprisingly, the Syrian...

“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”—Senator Frank Church (1975) We now find ourselves operating in a strange paradigm where the...

This would seem to embody the USDA’s advisory, “Know your farmer, know your food,” right? Not exactly. For the USDA and its sister food regulator, the FDA, there’s a problem: many of the farmers are distributing the food via private contracts like herd shares and leasing arrangements, which fall outside the regulatory system of state and local retail licenses and inspections that govern public food sales. In response, federal and state regulators are seeking legal sanctions against farmers in...

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 months. They are routinely breaking their own rules and covering it up. The Post article quotes an NSA spokesman assuring the paper that the NSA attempts to identify such problems “at the earliest possible moment.” But what happened...

Egypt’s US-financed armed forces have gone to war against Egypt’s people. Arab spring has become Arab winter.So far, army and security police have scored brilliant battlefield victories against unarmed men, women and children, killing and wounding thousands who were demanding a return to democratic government.The latest Cairo protests by supporters of the elected Morsi government have been scattered by gunfire and huge armored bulldozers resembling the giant vehicles used by Israel to smash...

The appointment of Robert Ford as the new American ambassador to Egypt was indeed an ominous sign that the Obama administration expected civil war conditions to arise in Egypt. Ford’s forte during his hugely successful “diplomatic’ assignment in Baghdad in the middle of the last decade was to organize the notorious death squads, which tore Mesopotamia apart and destroyed Iraq almost irreparably. Equally, Ford played a seminal role in his subsequent ambassadorial assignment in Damascus in 2011...

What was President Obama thinking? Last week's trip to Egypt by the neoconservative dynamic duo, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, seemed like an improbably bad idea from the start. In the highly delicate situation inside Egypt, where the military is expected at any moment to initiate another bloody crackdown against supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, Graham and McCain would not be most people's choice to smooth tensions. Nevertheless it was reported that they traveled...

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 was a “suspected militant,” but Yemeni citizens have for a long time been outraged over the number of civilians killed in such strikes. The media has reported that of all those killed in these recent US strikes, only one of the...

My wife and I were in the middle of a three-month cross-country road trip in the Fall of 2011. We had just driven for over three hours to a small community center in northwestern Iowa where I found myself shaking hands with a man who had transformed my thinking. I was nervous, and the only words I could get out for my big moment of meeting Ron Paul were “thank you”. But maybe that was enough. I grew up in a very conservative Christian home where timeless principles such as the Golden Rule were...

It was five years ago that the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvilli, who was installed in power by the Washington supported “Rose Revolution,” launched a military invasion of South Ossetia, a break-away province under its own government. The Georgian attack killed Russian peace-keeping troops and numerous Ossetians.The Russian military response overwhelmed the US trained and equipped Georgian army in 5 days to the embarrassment of Saakashvilli and his Washington sponsors.Washington began...

Everyone is talking about Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos's recent purchase of the Washington Post. Less noticed is the conflict of interest between his ownership of the Post and Amazon’s potentially significant profits from computing and data storage contracts with numerous US government agencies including the CIA. The question is whether the newspaper will be able to even-handedly report on the US government despite Bezos's financial interest in US government contracts. Though not as well...