Here’s a piece I wrote in 2009 on one of Obama’s first assaults on privacy. A few of the piece’s punchier lines: *Privacy is very lucrative for the Beltway boys: they reap millions when they betray it. *We now know that psychologists were brought to the prison at Guantánamo to exploit detainees’ weaknesses for interrogation […]
The New York Times published a long article today on secret rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The article describes the FISA court as “almost a parallel Supreme Court” which has cast aside traditional understandings of privacy and the Fourth Amendment. Reading between the lines, it is clear that NYT has the actual decisions…. […]
Kevin Gosztola has posted the NBC video of Thomas Drake’s excellent speech from yesterday’s anti-surveillance rally. Here’s the spiel:
Thomas Drake after his speech The Restore the Fourth organization had a rally at McPherson Square in downtown DC on this July 4th afternoon. They had several excellent speakers – including the Libertarian Party’s Carla Howell, CEI’s Ryan Radia, Cato’s Julian Sanchez, and Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin. (Other rallies are occurring across the nation.) […]
I was a big Civil War enthusiast as a boy. My sixth grade teacher wrote on my permanent record that I was “overly interested in war.” In this photo (probably snapped at Gettysburg), I’m sitting astride a cannon wearing a pair of flip-flops that definitely would have been out of place a century earlier. […]
Today is the 25th anniversary of the U.S. Navy shooting down an Iranian passenger jet. Following is the writeup on the shootdown from my 2003 book, Terrorism & Tyranny: In the wake of the Iranian arms debacle, the Reagan administration sent the U.S. Navy to patrol the Persian Gulf—in part to reassure Arab nations that the U.S. […]
The Washington Times, July 3, 2013 BOVARD: The voting rights mirage Satisfied to cast ballots, Americans stand idle while other freedoms are ravished by James Bovard Liberals are aghast at the Supreme Court ruling last week that struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg denounced the […]
Tennessee Budd
You forgot the lie of 1861. Some Americans, seeing
