War in Context

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• U.S. surveillance is not aimed at terrorists
• How Snowden has exposed the limits of American power
• Privacy and the threat to the self
• Rebecca Solnit: How to act like a billionaire
• Report finds one in three women abused
• Meet the WikiLeaks guy who got his Gmail seized by the feds
• The next Intifada
• Assange, back in news, never left U.S. radar
• Is Iran’s Supreme Leader really so supreme?
• How the U.S. spent billions on a plan that increases the danger of nuclear proliferation
• Music: Bebel Gilberto — Aganju
• Where did our ‘inalienable rights’ go?
• Amnesty: U.S. must not hunt down Snowden
• Hong Kong apparently welcomed Snowden’s departure
• Snowden took job to gather evidence of surveillance

U.S. surveillance is not aimed at terrorists Posted: 25 Jun 2013 11:25 AM PDT Leonid Bershidsky writes: The debate over the U.S. government’s monitoring of digital communications suggests that Americans are willing to allow it as long as it is genuinely targeted at terrorists. What they fail to realize is that the surveillance systems are best suited for gathering information on law-abiding citizens. People concerned with online privacy tend [...]

How Snowden has exposed the limits of American power Posted: 25 Jun 2013 11:20 AM PDT The New York Times reports: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia offered the first direct confirmation on Tuesday that Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive former American national security contractor, was in an international transit area at a Moscow airport, and he appeared to rule out American requests for his extradition to the United States. Speaking [...]

Privacy and the threat to the self Posted: 25 Jun 2013 11:15 AM PDT Michael P Lynch writes: In the wake of continuing revelations of government spying programs and the recent Supreme Court ruling on DNA collection – both of which push the generally accepted boundaries against state intrusion on the person — the issue of privacy is foremost on the public mind. The frequent mantra, heard from both [...]

Rebecca Solnit: How to act like a billionaire Posted: 25 Jun 2013 11:10 AM PDT National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, now charged with violating the Espionage Act, has opened a Pandora’s box of American global surveillance for the rest of us to be stunned by.  Every day a new revelation, a new set of secrets or information, seems to pour out from somewhere — without Hope, that last denizen [...]

Report finds one in three women abused Posted: 25 Jun 2013 11:05 AM PDT Al Jazeera: More than one third of all women around the world have been physically or sexually abused according to a new report by the World Health Organisation. In what it billed as the first-ever systematic study of global data on the prevalence of violence against women and its health impact, the UN agency said [...]

Meet the WikiLeaks guy who got his Gmail seized by the feds Posted: 25 Jun 2013 11:00 AM PDT Mother Jones reports: Last week, Herbert Snorrason received a “spammy” looking email from Google informing him that the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia had requested the contents of his inbox and other data in 2011. The tech company had complied, handing over a vast amount of his personal information. Snorrason is [...]

The next Intifada Posted: 25 Jun 2013 10:55 AM PDT Paul Pillar writes: The two and a half years of uprisings in the Middle East known collectively as the Arab Spring have had an apparent hole in the middle; there has not been a new full-blown uprising during this time by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. This fact is testimony to the ruthlessly effective [...]

Assange, back in news, never left U.S. radar Posted: 25 Jun 2013 10:50 AM PDT The New York Times reports: In June 2011, Ogmundur Jonasson, Iceland’s minister of the interior at the time, received an urgent message from the authorities in the United States. It said that “there was an imminent attack on Icelandic government databases” by hackers, and that the F.B.I. would send agents to investigate, Mr. Jonasson said [...]

Is Iran’s Supreme Leader really so supreme? Posted: 25 Jun 2013 10:45 AM PDT Gary Sick writes: With the surprising Iranian election over, and the moderate Hassan Rouhani elected by a clear majority, a new narrative is emerging. It asserts that absolutely nothing has changed, that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, let the election proceed for his own devious reasons, and that only he can make decisions about [...]

How the U.S. spent billions on a plan that increases the danger of nuclear proliferation Posted: 25 Jun 2013 10:40 AM PDT Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith write: A multibillion-dollar U.S.-led effort to stem the threat of a terrorist nuclear blast is slowly unraveling because of huge cost overruns at a federal installation in South Carolina and stubborn resistance in Moscow to fulfilling the program’s chief goal, according to U.S. officials and independent experts. The 13-year-old [...]

Music: Bebel Gilberto — Aganju Posted: 25 Jun 2013 10:37 AM PDT

Where did our ‘inalienable rights’ go? Posted: 24 Jun 2013 12:55 PM PDT Max Frankel writes: I envy the commentators who, after a few days of vague discussion, think they have heard enough to strike the balance between liberty and security. Many seem confident that the government is doing nothing more than relieving Verizon and AT&T and Facebook of their storage problems, so that government agents can, on [...]

Amnesty: U.S. must not hunt down Snowden Posted: 24 Jun 2013 12:50 PM PDT Amnesty International: The US authorities must not prosecute anyone for disclosing information about the government’s human rights violations, Amnesty International said after Edward Snowden was charged under the Espionage Act. The organization also believes that the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower could be at risk of ill-treatment if extradited to the USA. “No one should [...]

Hong Kong apparently welcomed Snowden’s departure Posted: 24 Jun 2013 12:45 PM PDT The New York Times reports: For Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has acknowledged leaking numerous documents about American surveillance operations around the world, the path to a sudden departure from Hong Kong late Sunday began over a dinner days before of a large pizza, fried chicken and sausages, washed down [...]

Snowden took job to gather evidence of surveillance Posted: 24 Jun 2013 12:42 PM PDT USA Today reports: NSA leaker Edward Snowden says he took his job with the National Security Agency for the sole purpose of obtaining evidence on Washington’s cyberspying networks, the South China Morning Post reported Monday. Snowden, who was in Hong Kong before fleeing to Moscow this weekend, told the newspaper that he sought a position [...]