mmckerral's blog
Some of you might recall the popular cartoon “Spy vs. Spy” that appears in MAD magazine. Throughout the comic strip panels the White Spy and the Black Spy would go to great ends to outwit one another with both never gaining the upper hand and often paying dearly for the effort. Following the news these days often reminds me of the comic strip, some aspects of the news watching equally laughable.
The media is spying on the government and private entities. The government is spying on the media.
For many years, naysayers cast those who talked about mass public surveillance by the U.S. government as “conspiracy theorists” or worse.
In the past 24 hours, “theory” became fact.
The disclosure of vast and ongoing government surveillance via phone and Internet snooping might come as a shock to some but not to me.
If you missed the CBS “60 Minutes” piece that aired a few weeks back called “A Face in the Crowd: Say goodbye to anonymity,” it’s worth then 13-minute investment of your time.
The facial recognition devices and software have been around for some time, but the extent to which it is being developed and used has increased exponentially and poses serious questions about personal privacy. Most people get the use of this technology for law enforcement purposes. The FBI is spending $1 billion to upgrade its photo database.
For some of us in the Bluegrass State, it seems like Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., started running for president when he announced his decision in 2009 to seek the Senate seat abandoned by the beleaguered Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Jim Bunning.
Paul showed his political acumen by quickly aligning himself with the Tea Party and trading on his father’s name, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.
President Barack Obama took to the podium Thursday to address two issues that have dogged his administration — one old and one kind of new.
Obama inherited the prison at Guantanamo Bay and escalated the use of drones in the war on terrorism. Both have been hot-button issues, but I think in some ways they are clearly connected: waging a war on terror in which tactics constantly change, and legal and ethical issues are complex and come with myriad constitutional threads.
The debate over the origins of Memorial Day, once called Decoration Day, continues.
President Lyndon B. Johnson officially deeded it to Waterloo, N.Y., in 1966.
But since the beginning of time, the world has mourned and honored those killed in war — a number impossible to measure or comprehend.
Recent statements by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor about the court’s intervention into the 2000 presidential election have some people happy, some people said and others scratching their heads. For me, it’s “What’s done is done.”
The recent deaths of two icons, musician Richie Havens and media mogul Al Neuharth, might not seem to have a lot in common.
But both attached themselves to vehicles with a huge impact on freedom and civic engagement — music and a free press.
High-profile, constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman took to the book promotion trail to talk about his latest offering, “On Constitutional Disobedience.”
In reading the book, reading about the book and reading his interviews about it, one of the best lines comes in an interview done with the Chronicle of Higher Education.
One of the top reasons iCitizenForum exists is to promote civic engagement and community activism.
Those come in many forms. But at the core of any civic engagement effort remains the idea that citizenship requires working each day to make a community — large or small — a better place.
One of the loudest voices for that kind of citizen behavior is government — at all levels.
