Scribbling, scribbling, scribbling on the Internet.
The former secretary of state and putative next president of the United States held a press conference today to explain that thing about her e-mails. It . . . um . . . didn't go well. Clinton now admits that yeah, maybe it would have been a good idea to use two e-mail accounts; one for …
Continue reading "Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Know the First Rule of Holes"
If you believe Glenn Greenwald’s new book (which I reviewed here), the NSA’s appetite for gobbling up communications is unlimited. Legal controls on its behavior are trivial. Its much-repeated claim that it does not spy on American citizens is a lie. And its goal in its collection activities is political control over citizens, whom surveillance renders …
“My position was straightforward,” Glenn Greenwald writes. “By ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them.” You break the law, you pay the price: It’s that simple. But it’s not that simple, as Greenwald must know. There are laws against government eavesdropping on American citizens, and there are …
In seeking to praise Glenn Greenwald and his new book, David Cole actually ends up condemning Glenn Greenwald and his new book: . . . [Greenwald] reports, for example, that the NSA cooperates with other countries’ spy agencies, even as they spy on us and we on them. Is anyone other than Greenwald “shocked, shocked” …
Continue reading "On Glenn Greenwald’s Trips to the Woodshed"
I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn’t characterize him as a hero. If he wanted to raise the issues and stay in the country and engage in civil disobedience or something of that kind, or if he had been careful in terms of what he had released, then it would fit more …
The United States government has decided to give up its oversight of Internet addresses; a change that is supposed to take place over "an indeterminate timeline," but a significant and groundbreaking change nonetheless. More from the story: Pressure to let go of the final vestiges of U.S. authority over the system of Web addresses and domain …
Continue reading "“Who Takes the Internet Takes the Universe!”"
From the time that Edward Snowden burst onto the public scene, he has told anyone who would listen that his objective in leaking secret NSA documents has been to show how the NSA has taken to spying on Americans. The latest disclosures from the Snowden files lay bare the methods by which British intelligence agencies are …
Continue reading "More Proof that Edward Snowden Is a Fraud"
Freedom’s parlous condition in Russia is not exactly a secret today, nor was it when [Edward] Snowden chose to fly to Moscow last summer and ask for political asylum. If his objective is to give people a voice in how they are governed, and to expose massive unbridled surveillance, he could speak out about practices of …
I don't have too much to say about the president's recent speech other than to note that it leaves in place the essentials of the current surveillance program, which the National Security Agency ought to be happy about. Some news is made in the president's announcement that the NSA will no longer be holding bulk metadata, …
Alternatively titled "Things Obamaphiles Didn't Vote For": As a young lawmaker defining himself as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama visited a center for scholars in August 2007 to give a speech on terrorism. He described a surveillance state run amok and vowed to rein it in. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens,” he declared. …
