Reason's Nick Gillespie weighed in on a government shutdown debate hosted at the New York Times called "What Federal Spending Are We Better Off Without?" Here's an important passage: The U.S. accounts for 40 percent of global expenditures on military might and, in...
New Videos of Edward Snowden Receiving Sam Adams Award
From RT: The first videos of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have surfaced since he received asylum in Russia. The footage, provided by WikiLeaks, was taken during the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence awards ceremony. The video fragments of a...
Justin Amash On How Congressional ‘Oversight’ Really Works
Yesterday I attended a great conference at the Cato Institute on the NSA's surveillance programs. I wrote a short piece on it at The Washington Times that you can check out here. One thing I didn't include in the piece, because I couldn't write fast enough to get the...
Why Is Rep. Eliot Engel So Upset About Suspending Egypt Aid?
Back when the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president, Mohamad Morsi, the Obama administration deflected calls to cut off aid, as is required by law in the event of a military coup. And as the months passed and the military regime...
Chelsea Manning Rejects Antiwar, Conscientious Objector, and Peace Activist Labels (and That’s Okay)
It must be strange to be Chelsea Manning. The former Army Private (previously known as Bradley Manning) did a very decisive thing by leaking thousands of documents to Wikileaks. In spite of some initial suggestions that she did this in some apolitical -- possibly...
Drones and the Human Cost of War
The prompt for a recent Atlantic Community call for articles on utilizing drones for military purposes asks “When do we have to start considering human rights violations and what the consequences of that might be?” As an American whose government has been a pioneer in...
Fun Fact: NSA’s Collection of Americans’s MetaData Doesn’t Make Us Safer
Fun fact: NSA's bulk collection of Americans' metadata doesn't fight terrorism. A shocker, I know. Remember a few months ago when it was revealed that the NSA collected the metadata of hundreds of millions of Americans in bulk, and in order to justify this exposed...
NSA Surveillance: What We Know; What to Do About It – Wednesday Cato Conference
The Cato Institute will hold a conference on NSA Surveillance tomorrow (Wednesday, 10/9). Registration is still available, send an email to events@cato.org. The conference runs from 10am to 4:30pm (Eastern time). The schedule and other details are posted here. The...
Kerry: If You Question the Legality of US Actions, You Are With the Terrorists
The Washington Times reports that since "Libya and the nation’s allies have questioned the legality of the U.S. operation" that captured a suspected al-Qaeda member, Secretary of State Kerry was prompted "to do some public relations damage control." In his damage...
Kill Capture Missions and the Privileges of the World’s Policeman
Many commentators are welcoming the news that President Obama ordered special operations forces into Somalia and Libya to "capture" suspected terrorists because at least he didn't drone bomb them instead. Granted, capturing suspects with the intention of trying them...
