Free Republic

The weeks following any year’s Oscars are a home film festival at our house, an attempt to evaluate which movies were snubbed on the big night, and which were overpraised. After absorbing the great performances but ultimately unsatisfying payoff of “Birdman,” and the underappreciated triumph of “Still Alice,” it was time to assess the documentary feature winner, “Citizenfour,” Laura Poitras’ journey through a few days in Hong Kong with NSA leaker Edward Snowden. My political differences with the filmmaker and her subject made me even more curious. She would have no trouble hitting a home run with surveillance-phobic libertarians and...

In the months since Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of the spying that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been perpetrating upon Americans and foreigners, some of the NSA's most troublesome behavior has not been a part of the public debate. This behavior constitutes the government's assaults on the American legal system. Those assaults have been conducted thus far on two fronts, one of which is aimed at lawyers who represent foreign entities here in America, and the other is aimed at lawyers who represent criminal defendants against whom evidence has been obtained unlawfully and presented in court...

Self-proclaimed civil libertarians are up in arms over the National Security Agency's massive database containing information about whom we call and what we do on the Web. Defenders of the program say, "So what?" Unless you're a terrorist, no one in the government will ever bother to access that information. That's not good enough, say civil libertarians. "At least 850,000 people have security clearances that give them access to this information," Tiffiniy Cheng of Fight for the Future recently wrote on The Huffington Post. "That's the size of Boston. Imagine if they leak information about a politician or business leaders'...

A former senior producer for MSNBC came out with harsh words for his former network Sunday. Writing at the far-left AlterNet, Jeff Cohen - the former senior producer of MSNBC's Donahue show - said, "When it comes to issues of U.S. militarism and spying, the allegedly 'progressive' MSNBC often seems closer to the 'official network of the Obama White House' than anything resembling an independent channel": Had McCain or Romney defeated Obama and implemented the exact same policies, treating whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden as foreign espionage agents, one would expect MSNBC hosts to be loudly denouncing the Republican abuses...

Obama wants the government in Egypt to honor the will of the Egyptian people. But what about the will of the people in the United States who clearly did not want Obamacare (and still don't like it)? What about the will of the people who want our troops home from Afghanistan? While pondering such obvious hypocrisy, note that the State Department is working overtime regarding America’s Mess in Egypt. Mr. Obama is bound by his own words, international law and the expectations of allies, such as Great Britain, not to acknowledge or support coups that overthrow duly-elected governments. For the...