All Posts Tagged With: "surveillance"
End the IMF
The sex scandal involving the recently departed International Monetary Fund chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn—criminal or not—was never a reason to abolish the agency. But then we didn’t need another reason. The agency, centerpiece of J. M. Keynes’s inflationary Bretton Woods brainchild, should never have been created in the first place, since it was another calculated step toward [...]
24Aug2011 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedPolice Have More, Better Rights than You
Justice itself depends on people being able to document their encounters with government agents, especially the police. If people are prevented from establishing the truth through evidence, then they have no defense against a corrupt, incompetent, or vengeful police officer.
15Feb2011 | Wendy McElroy | 27 comments | ContinuedBig Brother Is Watching You Recycle
In 2009, after four years of controversial and piecemeal policies intended to enforce recycling, England imposed a complex and compulsory system of garbage-sorting on homeowners. Citing the British model, Cleveland, Ohio, is taking a giant step toward a similar scheme of compulsory recycling. In 2011 some 25,000 households will be required to use recycling bins fitted [...]
24Nov2010 | Wendy McElroy | 28 comments | ContinuedThe Fourth Amendment and Faulty Originalism
“All arrests are at the peril of the party making them.” —Alexander H. Stephens, August 27, 1863 These days the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution means next to nothing. Consider, for example, the choice offered a few years ago: surveillance under routine, easy “warrants” from the drive-through FISA Court or warrantless surveillance at the whim [...]
25Aug2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 3 comments | ContinuedAn American Stasi?
A fusion center is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people
28Jul2010 | Wendy McElroy | 10 comments | ContinuedOrient Express to Hell
In 1986 and 1987 I slipped behind the Iron Curtain a few times to study economic perversity and political slavery. In November 1987 I flew into Hungary before heading on to the most repressive regime in Europe. The train from Budapest to Bucharest, Romania, was called the Orient Express. The original Orient Express began in [...]
20May2010 | James Bovard | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Politics of Freedom
Thomas Paine said that freedom had been hunted and harassed around the world and that only America offered it a home. Today, it seems to many Americans that freedom is on the run here, too. War and taxes, the nanny state and the Patriot Act, unsustainable entitlements—all threaten the liberty we enjoy as Americans. But [...]
1May2008 | David Boaz | 8 comments | ContinuedFederal Surveillance: The Threat to Americans’ Security
Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the Bush administration has launched many new surveillance programs in the name of homeland security. When critics raised questions about the potential abuses of the new powers, some administration supporters insisted that Bush’s new surveillance policies were benign because there was no evidence the programs were being abused. But [...]
1Jan2004 | James Bovard | 2 comments | ContinuedThe State’s Quest for Total Information Awareness
David Brown is a freelance writer and editor. This is the second of two parts. Efforts to transform the United States into a surveillance regime on a totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian model are currently underway. In addition to attempts to beef up and make uniform the state driver’s licenses-thereby blending them into either a de facto [...]
1May2003 | David M. Brown | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Pentagon Ramps Up the War on Privacy
David Brown is a freelance writer and editor. This is the first of two parts. [Editor's Note: As we went to press the U.S. Congress had hampered the Defense Department's ability to carry out the threat to privacy discussed in the following article. Under the provision adopted the Pentagon cannot proceed until it assesses for [...]
1Apr2003 | David M. Brown | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Danger of National Identification
It seems innocuous. What could be so sinister about finding out who people are? But the national identification regime that some in government and the media want to establish in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks would likely do much to threaten individual privacy and security while doing little in itself to prevent terrorism. [...]
1Oct2002 | David M. Brown | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Solzhenitsyn Files
“Freedom without a literature is like health without food. It just cannot be. To be sure, the yearning for freedom is deep in the hearts of men, even the slaves of the Soviets. But the yearning can turn into hard, numb despair if the faith upon which freedom thrives is not revivified from time to [...]
1Mar1996 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued-
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