More revelations have emerged that despite the NSA’s claims of strict safeguards to prevent abuse of its spying capabilities, the it systematically violated its pown privacy requirements in thousands of cases and committed even more illegal acts, with a judge ruling back in 2011 that the NSA had also been deliberately misleading the courts about what it has been doing. What a surprise! This information emerged as a result of the declassification of some documents in the wake of the uproar over what the Snowden revelations told us about the government spying on its own citizens. [Read more…]

A few days ago I linked to a story of Kadra Abdi, a young Somali-American woman who was profiled and harassed by immigration authorities on her return from a trip to Sweden. Now comes along an even worse story of TSA harassment on a domestic trip of Aditya Mukerjee, a young man of Indian origin. Mukerjee gives detailed account of his ordeal. [Read more…]

Despite the enormity of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations, some US senators who are in the know but are forbidden to speak openly are hinting that what has already been revealed is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. [Read more…]

According to the lawyer for Shaker Aamer, one of the many prisoners at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release but not allowed to leave, the authorities did not pass on to his client a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago that he had brought for him. That book dealt with the prison camps in the Soviet Union and was suppressed in that country. [Read more…]