Here are five lessons I learned. I learned that: 1) Law is not to be trusted without interrogating its complicity with privilege and power. 2) Identity is morally problematic, especially if you get yourself born a white male of class privilege. 3) A nation that lets itself be governed by fear will become a poorly governed nation. 4) The arrogance of power contributes to its own demise when confronted by persistent resistance, and finally…. 5) I learned that the anger called hope can overcome despair, create a community of resistance and build a future that seemed impossible.

RT @doctorow: Illegal e-waste dumped in Ghana includes unencrypted hard drives full of US security secrets [2009]

How Obama Can Encourage Tech Giants Like and to Aid Government

CIA to be restructured to "cover entire universe": Director

Google, Apple and Facebook are highly profitable and look likely to remain so. Still, a New Yorker looking up at the Pan Am, Chrysler and General Motors buildings might recall, wistfully, that the same must once have been said of those fallen titans, too.

The Air Force explains the departure of these drone pilots in the simplest of terms. They are leaving because they are overworked. The pilots themselves say that it’s humiliating to be scorned by their Air Force colleagues as second-class citizens. Some have also come forward to claim that the horrors of war, seen up close on video screens, day in, day out, are inducing an unprecedented, long-distance version of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).

The terminator robot becoming such a "catchy" representation is due, I believe, to the fact that our minds and the fears they dream up are embodied. We have evolved to fear moving atoms: tigers that could attack us, tornados that could ruin our shelters, waves that could drown us, human opponents that could harm us. Killer robots from the future are just a spinoff that cultural evolution has put onto our deeply rooted sources of fear that we've evolved to react to. Just because silent and stealthy taking over by AI does not give us the heebie-jeebies quite as much as roaring armies of terminators do, that doesn't mean it is not equally dangerous or even more so.

Death, drugs, and HSBC

The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings

RT @johnpilger: Since 1945, more than a third of @UN members - 69 countries - have suffered at the hands of US modern