The cynic in me tried to temper the thrill I felt when the early chapter of U.S.-Iran rapprochement reached its apex last month with the historic phone call between President Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. The leadership of these two belligerents finally...
I’ve had a couple of days to reflect after arriving back from Moscow where my whistleblower colleagues Coleen Rowley, Jesselyn Radack, Tom Drake and I formally presented former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with the annual Sam Adams Associates...
How much does Barack Obama love the defense corporations? Of course, we know what candidate and President Obama says about the influence of lobbyists in Washington. "I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
