His formulation implies that for the police to do their jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive. It also implies that the public would be safer if Americans with cellphones never started circulating videos of officers battering suspects in the first place.
.. “Every time I see a police officer, I get a cold chill. Even if I needed one, I wouldn’t call one.”
This is why crime is rampant in poor Black neighborhoods and not that police officers are afraid to do their jobs. If you believe that you could become the subject of their rage rather than the criminal you called about then you do not call the police. You take your chances with the criminals who you live with everyday. It makes the idea of becoming part of the gang more appealing.
Opinion: Merkel Must End Devil’s Pact with America
The US began systematically spying on the German government at least since 1999 (perhaps even earlier); in other words, two years before the attacks on New York and Washington. It is questionable that the German Agricultural Ministry’s fisheries department, which the NSA also spied on, had anything to do with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida.
.. It wasn’t security of the Western world that concerned the Americans. Instead they pursued their own interests, unscrupulously vying for slight political advantages in diplomatic dealings and in the struggle for economic prosperity. The reference to the terrorist threat has long become a fig leaf for habitual and brazen espionage.
.. But through her silence, Merkel has made the German government complicit. She allowed the law to be broken. She also permitted the principles that characterize open, democratic societies to be compromised.
The German government had the wrong priorities. There is no guarantee of security. Fear of an attack is no reason to sacrifice legal principles.
The Hypocrisy of the Internet Journalist
It’s been hard to make a living as a journalist in the 21st century, but it’s gotten easier over the last few years, as we’ve settled on the world’s newest and most lucrative business model: invasive surveillance. News site webpages track you on behalf of dozens of companies: ad firms, social media services, data resellers, analytics firms — we use, and are used by, them all.
.. Unlike most of the people I worked with at Wired, I understood the implications of what we were doing.
.. And it wasn’t just Wired, by any means; every news outlet slowly become an anchor of internet surveillance at the behest of the data warehousers and advertisers who became the news industry’s only path to survival in the 21st century.
.. What I’d do next is: create a world for you to inhabit that doesn’t reflect your taste, but over time, creates it. I could slowly massage the ad messages you see, and in many cases, even the content, and predictably and reliably remake your worldview.
How Mitch McConnell Proved Rand Paul Right
McConnell did so utterly unchastened by a Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last month, which said that the law did not actually allow the N.S.A. to do the things that the agency did in its name. Section 215 says that the N.S.A. can, after going to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, compel the production of “tangible things” that are “relevant” to an “authorized investigation.” As the Second Circuit found, the N.S.A. treated the entire universe of American phone records as one tangible thing, broadened relevance to the point of meaninglessness, and ignored the limitations that the law placed on what counted as a specific investigation, to the point that “the government effectively argues that there is only one enormous ‘anti-terrorism’ investigation, and that any records that might ever be of use in developing any aspect of that investigation are relevant to the overall counterterrorism effort.”
.. Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon, who has been a leader in trying to get Congress to fulfill its intelligence-oversight responsibilities, picked up on the theme of trust in his own speech on Sunday evening, in which he pointed out that James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, lied to him in a Senate hearing when asked about bulk collection—even though Wyden had told him in advance that he’d ask the question.