With revelations (yet again) that we are all essentially being watched virtually all the time, we might expect a popular backlash against such a massive and unprecedented intrusion on privacy. Americans may differ on a plethora of political issues, but there’s a common wisdom suggesting broad agreement on core principles such as individual liberty. Alas, [...]

Just as Bradley Manning’s court-martial was getting underway, another brave whistleblower dropped a bombshell into the media: The Obama administration is collecting data on every telephone call we make. Nearly 64 years to the day after George Orwell published his prescient book 1984, we have learned that the “Thought Police” are indeed watching every one [...]

Bradley Manning Has Done More for U.S. Security than SEAL Team 6 The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ source inside the U.S. Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden.  The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity [...]

Why we are 2nd Amendment Fundamentalists but the 4th Amendment doesn’t Count The Second Amendment to the Constitution is interpreted by lawmakers and judges in an absolute manner. Every American, we are constantly told– even mentally ill ones like the shooter at Santa Monica College who killed 6 persons on Friday, hunting our children as [...]

La indignación vuelve a ocupar, de manera inesperada e intempestiva, las plazas. Lo hace en Turquía y el guión se repite. Ocupación del espacio público, papel clave de la juventud, malestar con la clase política, y en particular con el primer ministro Recep Tayyip Erdogan, unidad en la diversidad, uso de las redes sociales, y [...]

La semana pasada, Glenn Greenwald, abogado constitucional, autor y columnista del periódico internacional The Guardian publicó liberaciones de información que detallan dos programas secretos de la agencia de seguridad nacional de EEUU (NSA). Los datos, entregados a Greenwald por Edward Snowden detallan el alcance de dos programas secretos de la NSA (Anonymous también ha liberado [...]

“American exceptionalism” is perhaps the most misunderstood phrase in politics. If, like the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, we define “exceptionalism” as “the condition of being different from the norm”—then it’s certainly true that America is exceptional. But we rarely stop to ask: Should we always want to be exceptional?

Artes y oficios burgueses para usar la “información” como arma opresiva No deben ser pocos los que piensan que hay que espiar a algunos “por el bien de todos”. Sólo así se explica el gasto descomunal que anualmente se hace en materia de cámaras ocultas, organización de cuerpos policiacos o militares especializados en “escuchas” telefónicas y [...]

Reagan waged a murderous assault on Central America On Mother’s Day, May 12, The Boston Globe featured a photo of a young woman with her toddler son sleeping in her arms.

Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is tantamount to an ‘executive coup’ against the US constitution In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us [...]