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FROM AP: AP Top U.S. News At 2 p.m. EST
If you have something to say...
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If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Indications show that there is little effort on the part of the U.S. government to ease its use of "eavesdropping" and "data collection" archives.
The protest against surveillance is turning global. A list of leading authors from around the world have signed the petition "A Stand for Democracy in the Digital age." One of them: German Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass explains why.
For journalists, and for the rest of us, silence is not neutrality; it ends up as acceptance of autocratic rule, a present festooned with pretty-sounding names like "anti-terrorism" and "national security."
What if Edward Snowden was made to disappear? No, I'm not suggesting some future CIA rendition effort or a who-killed-Snowden conspiracy theory of a disappearance, but a more ominous kind.
Since Edward Snowden's disclosures about widespread NSA surveillance, Americans and people everywhere have been presented with a digital variation on an old analog threat: the erosion of freedoms and privacy in exchange, presumably, for safety and security.
Is any single person synonymous with Washington dysfunction and deserving of Person of the Year? Given a lack of leadership, perhaps "Nobody" is the best vote to represent Washington gridlock.
In yet another dramatic revelation flowing out of whistleblower Edward Snowden, a journalism textbook from 1983 has been sent to several large media outlets, including the Washington Post, New York Times and the trailer park where Fox News is thought to originate.
Despite mounting evidence that global warming is leading to devastating environmental disasters in the Pacific region, the U.S. and its partners are suspicious of climate change advocates. Rather brazenly, Washington and its Pacific allies spy on those who are intent on reining in global warming.
Try as one might, it's pretty much impossible to miss how badly things have turned for President Barack Obama. Not that it hasn't been building all year.
The cyberlibertarian, John Perry Barlow, believes that we can no longer safeguard complete secrecy and privacy. He sat down with Alexander Görlach to discuss the true value of secrets, how the U.S. copied Nazi Germany and why driving a tractor boosts his creativity.
Where we are now with the drone strike policy is where we were with the NSA before Snowden's revelations: insiders know what's going on, but the broad public doesn't.
Whereas in normal times, individual liberty protects the citizen against the tyrannies of both Democracy and the State, when the State becomes sufficiently tyrannical, democracy fights on liberty's side.
If the drip-drip-drip of Snowden's mother of all leaks -- which began in May and clearly won't stop for months to come -- has taught us anything, however, it should be this: omniscience is not omnipotence. At least on the global political scene today, they may bear remarkably little relation to each other.
"Private data" on the Internet? Forget about it. How do you think a "free app" is free? Do you think the app providers are offering a public service to benefit humanity? Nope.
Just what kind of intelligence are the British and Americans trying to intercept through their base on Ascension? In light of recent revelations, it seems highly likely that both are interested in oil espionage in the South Atlantic.
What Edward Snowden has done is to force a long repressed debate about how much liberty, if any, we need to sacrifice in order to protect our security. Before his leaks, that urgent conversation was a non-debate because the violations of liberty were being done entirely in secret, beyond the reach of democratic deliberation. Even Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, a key author of the Patriot Act, was appalled. He wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder: "I am extremely troubled by the FBI's interpretation of this legislation ... Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American."
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