December 2013


Guardian U.K.

NSA and GCHQ collect gamers’ chats and deploy real-life agents into World of Warcraft and Second Life (more…)

Guardian U.K.

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough. (more…)

Christian Science Monitor

The National Security Agency vacuums up about 5 billion cell phone records each day that it uses to map locations and associations of foreigners – but also inevitably some Americans as well, according to top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor. (more…)

People requesting a peek into what the NSA has collected on them PERSONALLY have been universally met with a boilerplate response that “neither confirms nor denies” the existence of this data. (more…)

What happens to whistle-blowers after the whistle is blown (more…)

David Cay Johnston Newsweek

Anyone in a public-sector job looking forward to retiring in comfort should look carefully at what is going on in Detroit and Springfield, Ill. Sherlock Holmes would call it the case of the missing pension money. (more…)

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.  Eduardo Galeano (more…)

In the last decade, the threat of terrorism has been used to justify special exemptions from the Constitution, invasions of other countries, secret surveillance laws, monitoring of innocent people with no reasonable cause for suspicion, and continuous budget deficits, as vast sums of money go to fund the military and surveillance apparatus. (more…)