Peter Scheer

Civil liberties groups yesterday filed a brief in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court arguing that Google and Microsoft must be ungagged so they can describe their role in the government’s surveillance of the internet. The brief supports motions filed previously by Google and Microsoft requesting orders freeing them to publish information, in aggregate form,  about the extent of the government’s court-authorized access to their data. The First Amendment Coalition (FAC) organized the filing of

The Supreme Court has ducked the legal challenge to Prop 8, thereby avoiding a landmark ruling on one of the central constitutional claims of our time: the right of gays to marry, not just in California but in every state, city and village in the nation. While I take no pleasure in saying “I told you so,” this outcome, resulting from a political miscalculation by Jerry Brown, was predictable and predicted. In this 2010 article

First came news accounts of the government’s use of armed drones in the targeted killing of terrorists abroad. Then came the revelations about government surveillance programs, breathtaking in their scale, tapping into data on phone calls, emails, internet searches and more. These activities are, in fact, linked. The use of drones to target America’s enemies represents the fruition of technological evolution in weapon accuracy. While America’s previous military conflicts have been  characterized by military strategies