Category: 7. Obsession with National Security

  • Student Detained for Arabic Flash Cards

    Safer and safer: George, a physics major who’s studying Arabic, was pulled aside for secondary screening at the Philadelphia International Airport as he tried to go through security. When he emptied his pockets, the inspector saw his flash cards and he was arrested, handcuffed, locked in a cell for hours and aggressively questioned. Because of […]

  • Judge Dismisses NSA Wiretapping Case

    Great news for those who love bad news: A federal judge has dismissed Jewel v. NSA, a case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls and emails. In the ruling, issued late Thursday, U.S. District Court Chief […]

  • Obama Imprisons 50 Indefinitely

    Best Nobel Peace Prize Ever: The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday. via Glenn Greenwald […]

  • The CIA's Feline Weapon

    From Wiki Petey: Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched by the Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1960s attempting to use cats in spy missions. The first cat mission was eavesdropping on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but […]

  • Michael Chertoff's Greedy Fearmongering

    My buddy Alan was right: The body scanner is sure to get a go-ahead because of the illustrious personages hawking them. Chief among them is former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, who now heads the Chertoff Group, which represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines, Rapiscan Systems. For days after the attack, Chertoff made […]

  • Liberty, Safety and Privacy

    From Glenn Greenwald: The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double […]

  • Millions of Missing Bush Admin. Emails Found

    Burn it to a CD, mail it to your grandma: “The liberal groups CREW and National Security Archive litigate for sport, distort the facts and have consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues,” Stanzel said in a statement. The 22 million e-mails “would never have been found but for our […]

  • Blair on Iraq: WMD Weren't the Point

    More revelations from the UK: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he would have found a justification for invading Iraq even without the now-discredited evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to produce weapons of mass destruction. “I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean, obviously you would have had […]

  • Leaked: Script for 'Security Theater'

    The Transportation Safety Administration’s operating manual just got leaked online. Gems: The improperly redacted areas indicate that only 20 percent of checked bags are to be hand searched for explosives and reveal in detail the limitations of x-ray screening machines. …. The document contains a list of items for which screening is not required including […]

  • Michael Moore to President Obama RE: Afghanistan

    From HuffPo If you go to West Point tomorrow night and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president…. It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government… Your corporate backers are going to abandon […]