This week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published their study of 20 different law enforcement agencies’ use of SWAT teams on 800 occasions between 2011 and 2013. Their conclusions may not surprise people who have been following the militarization and the...
When talking of freewheeling domestic spying, it would behoove us to remember that it’s not just the National Security Agency (NSA) that needs reform and a tight leash. Hell, it’s not even just federal agencies who are disinterested in your Fourth Amendment rights....
After a month of media attention-grabbing shootings in Isla Vista, California, Las Vegas, and now at an Oregon high school, President Obama devoted some time in a Tuesday Q&A session on Tumblr.com to these sad incidents, saying that we should "be ashamed" to have...
All of the dirty DC dealings in Netflix’s House of Cards arguably make it the most cynical of the current crop of highly-acclaimed and talked over television shows. However, the epic Game of Thrones – in spite of its fantastical elements – paints an even more brutal...
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the Platonic Ideal of a government entity, at least in these United States. TSA is oppressive, it subjects people to indignities, and its paranoid goal of keeping us safe from terrorists is being done – by most...
On May 21, the $700 million dollar National September 11 Memorial Museum opened to the general public,12 years and change after that awful, now-historic day in September. The museum provoked controversy for years before it even opened. The astronomical cost – a...
Last summer, after the in-FBI-custody shooting of Ibragim Todashev, a friend of the elder Boston bomber, the Bureau told the same story they have been telling since 1993 – this was justified. Furthermore, documents acquired by The New York Times last June showed that...
On Tuesday, more than a dozen notable news organizations including The New York Times Company, Scipps Media, Hearst, and the National Press Club filed a brief with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) over the ban on commercial, news-gathering, and small...
On Tuesday, Clayton Lockett died of a heart attack more than an hour after his botched lethal injection began. Things went so wrong that the state of Oklahoma’s second scheduled execution for that night was stayed for 14 days. A notable thing about Lockett’s slow...
On April 15, seven police officers in Peoria, Illinois raided the home of Jon Daniel and his roommates. They took various electronics, and kept several residents of the house cuffed for hours. The reason for this raid? Any good student of the current state of American...
