Uncle Sam’s Vast Dragnet

Uncle Sam’s Vast Dragnet

| Jun 19, 2013 | Rights / DemocracyIn 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson dismantled the department charged with breaking codes and learning other nations’ secrets. Asked why, he said: “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.” Some sources quote him less elegantly...
Snooping Makes an Easy Road to Riches

Snooping Makes an Easy Road to Riches

| | UncategorizedOnly 23 percent of Americans, a new Reuters poll says, consider former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden a “traitor” for blowing the whistle on the federal government’s massive surveillance habit. Many Americans clearly do find the...
Metadata Mining Is Mega Awful

Metadata Mining Is Mega Awful

| | Rights / DemocracyIt’s good to know that our friendly, über-secret National Security Agency is out there every day, protecting our freedom. By violating it. A whistleblower has blown the lid off the NSA’s super-snoop program of rummaging electronically through about a...
Dancing Around the First and Fourth Amendments

Dancing Around the First and Fourth Amendments

| Jun 12, 2013 | Rights / DemocracyWhether you think spying is OK or not depends on your relationship to the information being collected. If you’re on the gathering end, the invasion of someone else’s privacy doesn’t seem like a big deal. But if you’re the one whose private life...