The evolution of information technologies will beckon us to expand the powers of governments, especially when we believe they would serve the common good, like during a pandemic. A bit of reflection should give us pause.
Political moods swing back and forth, but the powers of surveillance and repression only grow—and there is good reason to fear what the Trump administration will do with them.
The great majority of the American political class were complicit in the deceptions that led to the Iraq war—and are desperate for the rest of the country to forget it.
As the still-unfolding revelations of NSA surveillance over virtually all of Americans’ telecommunications show, it is clear that privacy advocates have their work cut out for them. Two recent books decry the privacy violations but stop short of formulating workable ways to protect privacy interests.
No serious privacy-watcher was surprised, I suspect, at Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency revelations. Major New York Times stories at the end of 2005 had already implied that Washington was monitoring virtually all Americans’ telecommunications traffic—both phone calls and e-mails. …
The strange alchemy of public discourse has unexpectedly thrust notions of terrorism into the forefront of current public controversy. Republicans castigated the Obama administration for underestimating the role of “terrorists” in the September 11, 2012 slayings of four American officials …
Click here to read James B. Rule’s initial essay, “Israel: The Great Disconnect,” and here to read Michael Walzer’s response. Michael Walzer is a desperate man. When people this smart start making arguments this bad, you know that their worldview …
Click here to read Michael Walzer’s response to this essay, and here to read a reply by James B. Rule. I was attending a friend’s wedding at the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan. Before starting the ceremony, the rabbi was …
James B. Rule: Surveillance and Occupy
James B. Rule: Bringing out the Worst
Bad faith, indeed! George Packer’s opening sentences in the New York Times Magazine article he published as the Iraq invasion loomed read, “If you’re a liberal, why haven’t you joined the antiwar movement? More to the point, why is there …
The invasion of Iraq was a defining moment for the United States. This was the kind of war that many Americans believed formed no part of this country’s repertoire—an aggressive war of choice. Its aim was not to stop some …
A criticism of Pascal Bruckner’s anti-anti-Americanism.
The War in Iraq and Dissent
Hucksters in the White House
