The strange story at the top of the headlines — the current president and the most recent former president are both the subject of special-counsel investigations for taking home classified documents when they left the White House — rests upon two premises. One is patently false. The other is brazenly silly. Americans believe their nation... Read More

The Intercept, which has long been associated with the documents shared by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has yet to fire any of the reporters responsible for these breaches that have seen two whistleblowers already imprisoned and third, Daniel Hale, likely to be imprisoned. Early Thursday morning, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Daniel Everette... Read More

Starting with Hammurabi, rulers have frequently appreciated that their subjects would be more acquiescent to being governed if they had at least a minimal appreciation that they were being treated fairly. That understanding has led to the development of law codes along the lines of the Roman Republic’s laws of the Twelve Tables, which were... Read More

It has been observed that the Barack Obama administration has employed the state secrets privilege more than all preceding presidential administrations combined. There is a certain irony inherent in that fact as Obama ran for office in 2008 specifically committing himself to creating a more open and transparent government. The contemporary version of the state... Read More

In a recent discussion I had with Scott Horton on his radio show, we speculated as to why the White House, which surely includes very many smart, hard-working, and responsible people, just cannot seem to recognize the cognitive dissonance inherent in supporting contradictory policies in places like Syria. Supporting the “rebels” in an effort that... Read More

Who can keep up? The revelations -- mainly thanks to the documents Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency -- are never-ending. Just this week, we learned that GCHQ, the British intelligence agency whose activities are interwoven with the NSA’s, used a program called Optic Nerve to intercept and store “the webcam images of... Read More