These videos are the first of Mr Snowden after being granted asylum in Russia.

Pratap Chatterjee TomDispatch.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175757/tomgram%3A_pratap_chatterjee%2C_big_bro_wants_you/ Big Bro is watching you. Inside your mobile phone and hidden behind your web browser are little known software products marketed by contractors to the government that can follow you around anywhere. No longer the wide-eyed fantasies of conspiracy theorists, these technologies are routinely installed in...

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers popularresistance.org http://www.popularresistance.org/popular-resistance-newsletter-finding-our-way-to-empathy-passion-and-resistance/ Public opinion is going through a major change.  The combination of the collapsed and languishing economy; and people standing up and speaking about taboo subjects out loud is creating a new political narrative. The Brookings Institution, a mainstay of Washington, DC think tanks, found...

Chris Hedges truthdig http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_sparks_of_rebellion_20130930 I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. They were frantic searches for the triggers of revolt. Vladimir Lenin placed his faith in...

Norman Solomon Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/30-0 To the people in control of the Executive Branch, violating our civil liberties is an essential government service. So — to ensure total fulfillment of Big Brother’s vast responsibilities — the National Security Agency is insulated from any fiscal disruption. The NSA’s surveillance programs are...

David Sirota AlterNet http://www.alternet.org/world/its-time-finally-admit-were-empire?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark Is America an empire or not? It is a loaded question because in the modern age, that word — empire — is not a moniker citizens proudly embrace in the way we might imagine the Ottomans or the Romans did during their reigns. Instead, the word...

by Sean Hollister The Verge Following public outcry about the US government’s controversial domestic surveillance programs, members of Congress have rushed to propose solutions. Now, four senators have combined a number of those ideas into a single piece of proposed legislation that would prohibit several questionable practices that US government agencies...

"Orwell could never have imagined anything as complete as this, this concept of scooping up everything all the time. This is something potentially astonishing about how life could be lived and the limitations on human freedom."

Norman Solomon Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/24-0 There’s something profoundly despicable about a Justice Department that would brazenly violate the First and Fourth Amendments while spying on journalists, then claim to be reassessing such policies after an avalanche of criticism—and then proceed, as it did this week, to gloat that those policies...

Christopher Calabrese , Matthew Harwood Tom Dispatch http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175750/ For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people...