John Stossel: Drive Free
Caution: government speed bump ahead. If you saw a fat man in a sleigh distributing presents this week, he was in violation of several government regulations. The Federal Aviation Administration has complaints about his secret flight path. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources might shoot his unauthorized reindeer ... MORE
Snowden's Christmas Message: Privacy Matters
"The mission is already accomplished." In a message broadcast Wednesday on British television, Edward J. Snowden, the former US security contractor, urged an end to mass surveillance, arguing that the electronic monitoring he has exposed surpasses anything imagined by George Orwell in "1984," a dystopian vision of an ... MOREObama's Top 10 Constitutional Violations Of 2013
By Ilya Shapiro. One of Barack Obama’s chief accomplishments has been to return the Constitution to a central place in our public discourse. Unfortunately, the president fomented this upswing in civic interest not by talking up the constitutional aspects of his policy agenda, but by blatantly violating the strictures of our founding document. ... MOREFusion Centers: Expensive And Dangerous To Our Liberty
by John Glaser. A domestic surveillance system established after the terrorist attacks of September 11 collects and shares intelligence on a mass scale about “the everyday activities of law-abiding Americans, even in the absence of reasonable suspicion,” according to a new report. The
report, released this month by the Brennan Center for Justice, ... MOREJacob Sullum: Vaping Gives Politicians The Vapors
Banning e-cigarettes because they look like real thing. A few weeks ago, as the New York City Council's health committee
considered a ban on using electronic cigarettes in public, several
fans of the battery-powered devices sat in the audience,
demonstrating their operation. "I'm watching puffs of vapor go up
in this room," ... MOREWalter E Williams: Dumb Politicians Won't Get Elected
A vote-buying technique called handouts. Politicians can be progressives, liberals, conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, and right-wingers. They just can't be dumb. The American people will never elect them to office. Let's look at it. For years, I used to blame politicians for our economic and social mess. That changed during the 1980s ... MOREDoug Bandow: Obamacare's War On Civil Society
One more gift from big government. Washington offers many opportunities for Schadenfreude, that wonderful German word which means to enjoy the misery of others. The sudden realization of liberal professionals who voted for Barack Obama that they will be forced to spend thousands more on health insurance was one of those ... MOREEric Peters: Good Cops?
All cops are bad – by definition. Harsh statement? Certainly. It does not make it less true – like an accurate terminal cancer diagnosis. Pretending otherwise doesn’t alter the reality. Whether the cops themselves are conscious of their badness is immaterial. No doubt, many cops (as distinct from peace officers) believe in their hearts ... MOREFormer Top NSA Official: “We Are Now In A Police State”
America has a "totalitarian process" in place. Bill Binney is the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information. A 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, Binney was the senior technical director within the agency and managed thousands of NSA employees. ... MOREProstitution Freed From Legal Restrictions In Canada
by Brooke Magnanti. Yesterday, the long running saga of sex worker
Terri Jean Bedford's (pictured at right) challenge to Canadian
restrictions on prostitution came to a head as the Supreme Court of
Canada unanimously struck down
several such laws in
Canada v. Bedford. Declaring laws restricting
brothel-keeping, negotiating the ... MOREPoll Finds Falling Resistance To Marijuana Legalization
by Jacob Sullum. A new A.P. poll finds that the number of Americans who oppose marijuana legalization has fallen dramatically in the last few years. In a survey completed last week, 29 percent of respondents said they opposed “legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use,” compared to 55 percent ... MORECivil Forfeiture Hurts Law Enforcement Too
Rebecca Fudek on credibility forfeiture. “I’ve always paid my taxes and have never been arrested or charged
with any crime in my life. I am a successful small-business man. But in
January of this year, I woke up to find that my business’ entire bank
account — more than $35,000 — had been wrongly seized.” These are the words of Terry Dehko, who ... MOREFBI Spooks: Infiltrating and Informing
by J.D. Tuccille. The National Security Agency isn't the only arm of the government in the surveillance business. According to a September report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "every 90 days for the past seven years the FBI has obtained secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court orders compelling telecommunications ... MOREVeronique de Ruby: Slouching Toward Bankruptcy
Its dangerous to put off Social Security reform. In November 2004, President George W. Bush was re-elected after campaigning on personal accounts for Social Security. It was unfair, he argued at the time, to make a generation of young people pay into a system that's going broke. Bush's plan promised to make the program solvent, ... MORE
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