 |
 |
|
|
|
||
In the United States, we rightly pride ourselves on many things. Yet it turns out that the United States is behind countries such as Namibia, Mali, Estonia, and Papua New Guinea in one very important area. Reporters Without Borders have recently released their Press Freedom Index for 2011-2012, and the U.S. is 47th, just below [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, liberties, Politics
The moral claim for intellectual property – that an inventor has the exclusive right to the application of a certain idea in the form of a monopoly granted by the state – has long been on shaky ground. Reductio ad absurdum, where would the monopoly stop? When the inventor dies? 70 years afterward, as current [...]
Filed under: Decentralism, Economics, Ideas, Law, liberties, Technology
Jack Hunter writes at The Daily Caller that the Senate’s passage of the National Defense Authorization Act has handed a victory to terrorism. The bill’s provisions allow the federal government to “detain… American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland,” according to Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is strongly in favor [...]
After making what is likely the catch of a lifetime, an 881 lb. bluefin tuna, Carlos Rafael learned that he would not be reaping the rewards of his work. Making shore with his prized catch, the fisherman was greeted by agents of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Law Enforcement. The fish was [...]
When the government needs to be held accountable for its activities, can we simply take it at its word, or let one bureaucracy vouch for the other? That’s what’s happening amid questions about the health risks of using backscatter X-ray machines at airports. ProPublica reports: Earlier this month, a ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation found that the [...]
Filed under: liberties
The PC police are at it again. According to a sympathetic Associated Press report on November 7 and a survey conducted by the American Association of University Women, “sexual harassment is pervasive in grades 7-12.” Such improprieties are taking place “in person or electronically via texting, email and social media,” and those issuing and summarizing [...]
Most Americans seem to inured to the fact the government — in concert with the corporate sector — has found a zillion ways to pillage their privacy over the last decade using an ever-evolving range of technology: police who stop you on the side of the road can now extract everything from your cell phone [...]
I was extremely pleased to see my take on the original Occupy Wall Street protest posted online yesterday, but I feel it may already be largely outdated. I wrote the piece in early October as an attempt to understand what the movement was all about. Although I never fully agreed with what most protesters were [...]
Cato’s Jim Harper sees peril in Romney’s love of E-Verify, a supposedly anti-immigration database with plenty of potential for collateral damage to citizens’ liberties: “It’s technically possible to have a biometric card that solely indicates one’s qualification to work under federal law,” Harper says, “but as I wrote in my paper, ‘Franz Kafka’s Solution to [...]
Filed under: Immigration, liberties
The recently revealed joint CIA/NYPD operations being run all along the Eastern Seaboard are, of course, completely illegal but are perhaps symptomatic of the past decade’s use of the word “terrorist” to excuse any and all bad behavior by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The NYPD Intelligence Division and Counter-Terrorism Bureau, which incorporates a “dirty [...]
Filed under: liberties, Uncategorized