The Obama administration has announced the formation of a panel of “outside experts” to review the NSA’s surveillance practices. And a wide-ranging, diverse collection of experts they are; when it comes to institutional backgrounds and viewpoints, they span the entire spectrum from A to B. They remind me a bit of the space shuttle crew…

Across the world, people are protesting against US intervention in Syria. Polls show widespread skepticism of the impending war. Rather than making Americans safer, intervention is likely to support forces connected to al Qaeda. Yet it still seems inevitable that the US government will launch cruise missiles at Syria, escalating the country’s bloody civil war….

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that when a garment gets so old, attempting to patch it with new cloth will just tear it up worse. The authoritarian state seems to be reaching that point, beyond which any attempt to patch it up or prolong its life just inflict new damage and hasten…

In a recent article, Allison Benedikt makes her case that, as the title says, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person” (Slate, August 29). She clarifies: “Not bad like murderer bad — but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad.” The proper course of action, she argues, is to take one for…

In response to Bashir Assad’s crossing of a “red line” by allegedly using chemical weapons against his own people, Secretary of State John Kerry cites his own fatherly feelings as justification for the all-but-inevitable looming US military intervention in Syria. “As a father, I can’t get the image out of my head, of a father…

Whether or not Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, President Obama has no legitimate grounds to intervene. U.S. airstrikes, intended to punish and deter Assad and degrade his military but not overthrow his regime, would deepen the U.S. investment in the Syrian civil war and increase the chances of further intervention. Obama’s previous intervention is what…

Seems as if supplying Syrian rebels with arms just isn’t enough. The US government and its Western allies are about to unleash direct military force in the small Middle Eastern country. We have heard the drumbeat of war for a long time – now as early as Thursday bombs may start falling on Syria. Instead of regime change, we are told,…

As the US government ramps up toward war on Syria’s regime, a sense of puzzlement seems to have descended upon America. Politicians can’t seem to identify any “legitimate” US “interest” that war would serve; polls show that the public opposes the project; military leaders, when pressed to propagandize for intervention, have instead repeatedly cautioned that…

Trigger warning: The following article discusses rape, sexual assault, and transphobic violence Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower who released evidence of US war crimes to WikiLeaks, has announced that she identifies as a woman. “Given the way I feel and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible,” she wrote…

The U.S. government’s persecution of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning (who came out publicly as a transgender woman after sentencing) is the latest example of a general rule: In the transitional struggle between networks and hierarchies, sometimes networks’ most powerful weapons are the hierarchies themselves. You spend a few thousand bucks to yank a network’s…

At a 2011 press conference President Obama, in response to a question about Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, said “We are a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make decisions about how the law operates.“ Is this really a nation of laws, though? There’s an old legal principle, “nemo iudex in causa sua,” which translated…

From the beginning of the Bradley Manning show trial, it has been apparent that the state is the criminal, not Pfc. Manning. Yet the WikiLeaks whistleblower was just sentenced to 35 years in prison. Manning is being punished for exposing government crimes, most famously U.S. troops shooting innocent civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in the Collateral Murder video….

On Wednesday, we learned the fate of American whistleblower PFC Bradley Manning. Manning was sentenced to  35 years in prison for leaking documentation of war crimes to Wikileaks, after conviction on violating key provisions of the Espionage Act (an act which is in and of itself an offense to liberty and repeatedly abused by the…

Not too long ago, I predicted that if I live to the average American male lifespan of 76 — I’m 46 now — I’ll have outlived the United States as we know it. At the time, I feared I was being over-optimistic, but lately I’m leaning the other way and thinking that my timetable may…

In theater productions of Peter Pan, there’s a scene where Tinkerbell is dying. Peter exhorts the audience to clap their hands to save her. If everyone just claps harder and says “I believe in fairies!” Tink will be restored to life by the power of faith and love. Progressive calls to defeat corporate power and…

Most people take it for granted — because they’ve heard it so many times from politicians and pundits — that they must trade some privacy for security in this dangerous world. The challenge, we’re told, is to find the right “balance.” Let’s examine this. On its face the idea seems reasonable. I can imagine hiring…

Egypt is in turmoil. As I write this, more than 500 people have been killed and thousands wounded in an ongoing conflict between the Egyptian military (on behalf of a coup-installed junta) and supporters of the overthrown Muslim Brotherhood regime (supporters of the Brotherhood believably claim the death toll is probably much higher). In the…

Lots of people have lots of complaints about the Internet, and some of those complaints are based in fact. One that I hadn’t heard before, until US Secretary of State John Kerry brought it up in recent remarks to embassy personnel in Brazil, is that the Internet makes it “much harder to govern, much harder to…

“An open, public, informed conversation on surveillance,” writes Philip Bump in The Atlantic Wire, “has been the president’s stated goal since shortly after the Edward Snowden leaks began” (“It Doesn’t Count as Outreach When Obama Talks About the NSA in Secret,” August 9). In a society governed by “rule of law” as portrayed by our,…

Even as the U.S. security state becomes more closed, centralized and brittle in the face of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks, civil society and the public are responding to the post-Snowden repression by becoming more dispersed and resilient. That’s how networks always respond to censorship and surveillance. Each new attempt at a file-sharing service, after…