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By Melvyn P. Leffler
$13.60
By Carl Safina
$15.55
$23
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nolifebeforecoffee (CC BY 2.0)
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Intelligence experts say criticism that the FBI should have done more to catch the Tsarnaev brothers and prevent the Boston Marathon bombings could provoke government agencies to infringe civil liberties.
Posted on Apr 23, 2013
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Flickr/Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
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By Chris Hedges — The ideology espoused by “humanitarian interventionists” such as Suzanne Nossel, recently appointed the executive director of PEN American Center, is used by the security and surveillance state to perpetuate war crimes, curtail civil liberties and justify pre-emptive war.
Posted on Apr 7, 2013
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AP/Senate Television
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By Tracy Bloom — The confirmation of John Brennan, the man tapped by President Obama to head the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared to be a slam dunk. That is, until Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., took to the Senate floor to begin a lengthy filibuster of Brennan’s nomination that served as a scathing indictment of the Obama administration’s targeted killings policy.
Posted on Mar 9, 2013
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Flickr/david_shankbone (CC-BY)
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The filmmaker and liberal activist is taking a stand against President Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act by supporting a lawsuit that seeks to change the “dangerous” measure, and he’s urging others to do the same.
Posted on Feb 7, 2013
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The fiscal cliff is delayed, the 113th Congress is sworn in, the NDAA is signed, the Violence Against Women Act is killed and the LA Times is reborn.
Posted on Jan 4, 2013
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The fiscal cliff is delayed, the 113th Congress is sworn in, the NDAA is signed, the Violence Against Women Act is killed and the L.A. Times is reborn.
Posted on Jan 4, 2013
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Electronic Frontier Foundation (CC BY 2.0)
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As the larger part of American culture seems ready to surrender its claim to privacy without question, organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are riding like Paul Revere through the digital Massachusetts night.
Posted on Dec 29, 2012
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TheeErin (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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On Friday, Congress extended through 2017 a bill that grants the government power to monitor Americans without a warrant and accepted none of the proposals to ensure protections to privacy and civil liberties.
Posted on Dec 29, 2012
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David Orban (CC-BY)
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By Thomas Hedges, Center for Study of Responsive Law —
Whistle-blowers have warned that intelligence agencies are abusing the Constitution and lavishing private companies with expensive contracts in exchange for subpar results.
Posted on Nov 30, 2012
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kevin dooley (CC BY 2.0)
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By Karen Greenberg, TomDispatch —
First the financial system collapses and it’s impossible to access one’s money. Then the power and water systems stop functioning. Within days, the country finds itself fractured and fragmented—hardly recognizable. Think of it as 9/11/2015.
Posted on Oct 22, 2012
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AP/Steve Miller
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By Chris Hedges — A disturbing pattern of gross infringements on basic civil liberties, put in place in the name of national security, has poisoned our legal system.
Posted on Oct 1, 2012
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Viktor Nagornyy (CC BY 2.0)
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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg points to the NYPD’s covert counterterrorism program as a model for the rest of the country. But according to a deposition given by the department’s intelligence commander earlier this summer and unsealed on Monday, police eavesdropping on conversations between Muslims has led to no terror investigations.
Posted on Aug 22, 2012
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WarmSleepy (CC BY 2.0)
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New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly on Wednesday revealed that for the last six months the city has been monitoring its residents via a network of roughly 3,000 closed circuit television cameras that feed into NYPD headquarters. The technology is termed the “Domain Awareness System.”
Posted on Aug 9, 2012
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"Democracy Now!"
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A federal judge on Wednesday said that her earlier ruling on the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act applied to everyone, not just the plaintiffs in the case. She made the clarification in upholding a preliminary injunction that would block the military from indefinitely detaining American citizens it accused of supporting terrorists. Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges (above) is among the plaintiffs.
Posted on Jun 8, 2012
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AP/Mary Altaffer
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By Chris Hedges — We hoped we could draw attention to the injustice of the law. None of us thought we would win. But every once in a while the gods smile on the damned.
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YouTube/NCPCF2010
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It’s safe to assume that Big Brother would still have prevailed over Winston Smith had the ill-fated protagonist of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” been helped by public defender Stephen Downs. But we have reason to believe that Downs, who represents Muslim activists in trials that amount to little more than terrorist witch hunts, would not have backed down.
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As Chris Hedges reported Monday, American Muslims are being dragged into jail on dubious and unclear connections to terrorism. Meanwhile, the president retains the authority to kill U.S. citizens without trial. But most Americans aren’t speaking up. Salon blogger and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald discusses why.
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AP / John Minchillo
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By Chris Hedges — I spent four hours in a third-floor conference room at 86 Chambers St. in Manhattan on Friday as I underwent a government deposition.
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By Scott Tucker — In the winter of 2011, discussion about calling a general strike had already begun within Occupy Los Angeles. At the end of January 2012, in the wake of police raids against Occupy encampments, Occupy Los Angeles issued a call for a May Day general strike, which was quickly endorsed by Occupy Oakland.
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democracynow.org
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Late last year, President Obama pulled a fast one by changing his stance on the National Defense Authorization Act so suddenly and drastically that Americans were left with a bad case of legislative whiplash—and a very serious state of affairs with regard to our civil liberties.
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The great Internet switch-off; the ACLU vs. jailhouse abuse; S&P’s downgrade mania; Robert Scheer on the election, and Chris Hedges discusses his lawsuit against the president.
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: The great Internet switch-off; the ACLU vs. jailhouse abuse; S&P’s downgrade mania; Robert Scheer on the election, and Chris Hedges discusses his lawsuit against the president.
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AP / Brennan Linsley
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The indefinite detention center that has undermined American justice since the first prisoners arrived from Afghanistan 10 years ago Wednesday is still open for business in Cuba. (more)
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Ian Masters asks Dahlia Lithwick, a contributing editor at Newsweek and a senior editor and legal correspondent at Slate, to dig into the NDAA and report on whether our civil liberties are as threatened as they seem to be by the defense bill President Obama signed on New Year’s Eve.
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By David Sirota — Here are 10 current words and phrases that my kid may never know because they might end up as relics of a lost vernacular, starting with “civil liberties.”
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Wikimedia Commons
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Though they couldn’t stop the freedom-crushing National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 from becoming law, Truthdig salutes the efforts of the members of the U.S. Congress who took a stand against the NDAA in the final round of voting this week.
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White House / Pete Souza
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President Obama’s decision to not veto the defense authorization bill, which “would codify indefinite detention without trial into U.S. law for the first time since the McCarthy era,” is a “historic tragedy,” Human Rights Watch said Wednesday.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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The House passed the controversial National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday night, scarcely hours after President Obama caved to pressure from various factions in Congress and withdrew his veto threat. Let’s consider some of the scary tactics that would be permitted if the measure is signed into law.
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AP / Andy Wong
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By Bill Boyarsky — A recent trip to China made me think about the way life can go on in a police state when people are much more preoccupied with economic survival than with civil liberties.
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A new collection of writings by one of America’s greatest self-described Jewish atheists distills the essence of his half-century defense of civil liberties and jazz—the nation’s most original and influential art.
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Flickr / cobby17
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Canada’s Ontario province, possibly inspired by the decade-long assault on civil liberties in the U.S., has secretly passed a regulation allowing Toronto police to arrest anyone near the security zone for the upcoming G-20 financial summit who declines to identify himself or herself or submit to a search.
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He’s been held in solitary confinement in a New York jail for, as of this posting, 824 days on charges of supporting al-Qaida, but supporters of 29-year-old Fahad Hashmi, including Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, believe Hashmi’s case represents a potential threat to Americans’ civil liberties and took to the NYC streets for a demonstration on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
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hartmaninstitute.com
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Feeling their power, Israel’s conservative parliamentarians are drafting laws that appear to target Arab citizens, causing both allies and civil libertarians to cringe. One measure would create a loyalty oath, while another would punish any “call to negate Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state” with a year in jail.
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AP photo / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Bill Boyarsky — One of the worst messes facing the Obama administration is the disgraceful state of the federal government’s immigration detention centers.
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Flickr / sergis blog
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How did two nuns end up on a list of terrorists? Blame a now-defunct investigation by the Maryland State Police, who sent undercover troopers to spy on political groups and identify supposed terrorists, among them pacifists, environmentalists, a congressional candidate and those two feisty nuns. Update
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Composite: Flickr: oneras/free tibet
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By Aram Sinnreich and Masha Zager —
As tools like the Web, e-mail, voice over IP, Internet video, mobile phones and peer-to-peer file sharing become increasingly vital to our lives, limitations on speech and threats to our privacy are becoming increasingly important civil rights issues.
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fbi.gov
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The Justice Department was dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on Friday on a new set of rules designed to help FBI agents zero in on potential national security threats within the U.S., allowing them to gather information in public places—and even conduct interviews—without identifying themselves.
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z.about.com
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If authoring a war against innocent civilians abroad and civil liberties at home wasn’t enough, George W. Bush is toying with the idea of writing a book upon leaving the Oval Office in January.
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time.com
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As if 100 years in Iraq wasn’t enough, a top adviser to John McCain claims that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee supports and believes lawful Bush’s infamous warrantless wiretapping program.
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theactorsgang.com
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By Kasia Anderson — It’s usually a reliable sign that a once-original idea has been utterly stripped of its impact by the time it becomes the premise for a reality television show. Not so for “Big Brother.” Several seasons of that particular televised train wreck have come and gone, and besides, Apple Computer also cashed in on the whole surveillance paranoia theme ages ago. Big Brother is watching. We get it.
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Patrick Chappatte, Le Temps, Switzerland —
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AP photo / Fernando Llano
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Hugo Chavez sounded an optimistic note Monday after ending up on the losing end of a vote—by a slim 51 to 49 percent margin—that would have expanded his constitutional powers as Venezuela’s president and instituted changes in federal fund allocation and labor policy, among other proposed developments.
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AP photo / Evan Vucci
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In a scathing editorial on Sunday, The New York Times accused President Bush of playing on the nation’s post-9/11 fears in order to justify violating our civil liberties and protecting big telecom companies implicated in his wiretapping scheme. The Bush camp “use[d] the nation’s tragedy to grab ever more power for its vision of an imperial presidency,” the Times editorial board charged.
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AP Photo / John Marshall Mantel
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Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive and author of “You Have No Rights,” explains how our president became a “medieval king,” and why your civil liberties are in greater danger than ever.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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The Pakistani government may declare a state of emergency, which would grant it extraordinary powers, limit civil liberties and extend the political lifespan of embattled President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
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In case you missed it, this week’s original podcast features Robert Higgs, author of “Neither Liberty nor Safety.” He speaks with Truthdig’s James Harris and Joshua Scheer about how political opportunists and fear mongerers are gobbling up our individual liberties.
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Department of Homeland Security
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Robert Higgs author of “Neither Liberty Nor Safety” speaks with Truthdig’s James Harris and Joshua Scheer about how political opportunists and fear mongerers are gobbling up our individual liberties.
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National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, with the blessing of the White House, will rewrite the Reagan-era executive order that defines the function of the United States’ many spy agencies and prohibits espionage against Americans. While critics concede that the order is out of date, they worry that an administration with a fondness for spying on its own might seize the opportunity to trample on a few civil liberties.
Posted on Jun 12, 2007
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softvote.com
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President Bush has finally agreed to allow a secret court to oversee the NSA’s wiretapping program, which had been operating without warrants for years. The administration’s capitulation after 13 months of stubborn resistance might have something to do with pending congressional investigations and legal battles.
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