Technology is always a double edged sword. Take the case of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's), which are commonly called drones. As more people are starting to realize, drones can present threats to personal privacy and civil liberties. On the other hand, they can also increase transparency and perform tasks that are actually useful to society ( Read more... )

You would think the subject line would be obvious, right? And yet, I've heard many defenses of the NSA's surveillance programs that start with comparisons of the data collection practices of Google/Facebook/etc and those of the NSA. Some people point out that we really shouldn't be surprised that our privacy has been eroded because of the ( Read more... )

This narrative doesn't even make any sense. If the US intelligence community was so worried about Edward Snowden spilling secrets to the Chinese, the last thing they would do is go public and give him a ringing endorsement to verify his knowledge. This "former" CIA official is basically saying, "Hey Chinese intelligence, you definitely want to ( Read more... )

Does anyone remember all the stories that circulated in the fall and winter of 1990-91 in the run-up to the first Gulf War about how Iraqi soldiers were throwing babies out of incubators in occupied Kuwait? You know, the stories that, as it turned out, were completely made up?

Or do you remember when Colin Powell went before the United Nations ( Read more... )

This sentence from an article about Debra Nelson, the judge in the George Zimmerman trial, caught my eye:

The Orlando Sentinel described Nelson’s toughness by noting that she once sentenced a robber to 27 years in prison after he rejected a 20-year deal from a prosecutor.

This is not "toughness". This is an increasingly common tactic adopted by ( Read more... )

To ( Read more... )

To hear a lot of people talk, you'd almost think that the government was giving away truckloads of money to enable the lowest income Americans to live it up without having to worry about such things as working or paying bills. You'd think that we didn't have problems with crushing poverty or food insecurity or a vastly underfunded social safety ( Read more... )

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  Fittingly, we start off Science Friday with an item from the "One Nation Under Surveillance" Department (Hi, NSA guys!!!). Time magazine has some of the key facts you need to know about Big Brother the federal government's massive telephone surveillance program.
  


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  Yet another invasive species problem in the Great Lakes region. Wildlife officials ( Read more... )

I just have one question: How would John McCain or other Republicans react if a Syrian senator were to sneak across the border from Mexico and have clandestine meetings with an armed militia group whose goal was to overthrow the United States government ( Read more... )

A fascinating exercise has been going on this week: the Citizens Hearing on UFO Disclosure. The event has been live streamed over the Internet, with tomorrow being the last day. The stream can be accessed at www.citizenhearing.orgThe panel hearing the testimony is composed of former members of Congress and all procedures of an actual ( Read more... )