NEW YORK TIMES
March 4, 2012

Taking office not long after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly wisely decided to beef up the Police Department’s counterterrorism program significantly, to help federal law enforcement agencies avert another disaster.

Unfortunately, they did not provide for sufficiently strong supervision of this formidable and far-flung intelligence operation — to check the well-known tendency of all such agencies, operating in secrecy and under murky rules, to abuse their powers. It appears that many thousands of law-abiding Muslim-Americans have paid a real price for that omission.

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Related article:
Kelly Defends Surveillance of Muslims
(New York Times | Joseph Goldstein | February 27, 2012)

DIGITAL TRENDS
Geoff Duncan |January 4, 2012

Between SOPA, NDAA, telecommunications surveillance, and people’s willingness to share endlessly via social networking, will 2012 mark the year consumers irreversibly surrender their privacy and freedoms?

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POLITICO
Jeffrey Rosen | September 8, 2011

After Sept. 11, we’ve been told repeatedly, “Everything changed.” When it comes to the legal balance between liberty and security, however, the truism is at least partly true.

There’s no question that the legal dynamics of privacy and security were transformed by a series of laws and technologies that, in some cases, made us less free but no more safe. Many of these legal responses — the PATRIOT Act, for example — had been proposed years, even decades, earlier but passed only in the wave of fear after the terrorist attacks.

In particular, three of the post-Sept. 11 legal reactions — involving terrorist detentions, domestic surveillance and airport security — have made us a different nation than we could have imagined 10 years ago

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THE ATLANTIC
Nicholas Jackson | June 3, 2011

A lengthy report (PDF) released by the United Nations Friday argued that disconnecting individuals from the Internet is a violation of human rights and goes against international law. “The Special Rapporteur underscores the unique and transformative nature of the Internet not only to enable individuals to exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression,” according to the report’s summary, “but also a range of other human rights, and to promote the progress of society as a whole.”

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