I spy with my U.S. government eye: someone is tweeting you. Every day there seem to be more revelations of the U.S. government’s secret surveillance program by the NSA, tapping into user accounts, phone metadata and now social media networks of ordinary people.

In a rare instance of transparency, Twitter released its semiannual transparency report exposing a 40 percent rise in not only U.S. government requests, but also international governmental requests for users’ private information.

In the last six months, Twitter’s global network of micro blogging has received 1,157 data requests from the Obama administration, 87 from Japan and 26 from UK agencies. Although the majority of these requests come under court issued subpoenas, there are far more cases of U.S government surveillance as well as other international government surveillance that do not ... Read more »

From Fox News to the Weekly Standard, neoconservatives have tried to paint terrorism as a largely or exclusively Islamic phenomenon. Their message of Islamophobia has been repeated many times since the George W. Bush era: Islam is inherently violent, Christianity is inherently peaceful, and there is no such thing as a Christian terrorist or a white male terrorist. But the facts don’t bear that out. Far-right white male radicals and extreme Christianists are every bit as capable of acts of terrorism as radical Islamists, and to pretend that such terrorists don’t exist does the public a huge disservice. Dzhokhar Anzorovich Tsarnaev and the late Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev (the Chechen brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013) are both considered white and appear to have been motivated in part by radical Islam. And many terrori ... Read more »