Freedom isn’t free. The National Security Agency along with the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies of the U.S. government has been swapping information with private companies. In exchange for private companies giving the intelligence agencies information on their users, the private companies receive access to classified intelligence.

Killing based on patterns of behavior rather than investigation and identification, not surprisingly, leads to a lot of innocent people being killed.

Gary Webb is getting an apology from an unlikely source. The Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who was drummed out of the newspaper industry after writing a story exposing the CIA’s involvement in the introduction of crack cocaine in America is getting a posthumous apology from one of the people who helped drum him out.

Darwin observed that conscience is what most distinguishes humans from other animals. If so, grief isn’t far behind. Realms of anguish are deeply personal—yet prone to expropriation for public use, especially in this era of media hyper-spin. Narratives often thresh personal sorrow into political hay. More than ever, with grief marketed as a civic commodity, the personal is the politicized.

President Obama’s speech yesterday, presenting his vision of a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy, included welcome rhetoric about the importance of constitutional principles, including Due Process and rights to dissent. It may represent the high watermark for civil liberties since his inauguration five years ago.

It is disappointing, given his thoughtful words, that he ignored so many inconvenient truths. From extrajudicial assassination to free speech and freedom of the press, from the need to address root causes of terrorism to partnership with American Muslims, the president promoted important principles but papered over reality.

The new head of the CIA National Clandestine Service, Francis “Frank” Archibald, is listed in the Wikileaks Cables as authoring a confidential report from the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan regarding the naming of the embassy legal attache in a detainee torture case. Archibald discloses his involvement in communicating with other U.S. officials regarding public statements and press reports concerning the case. Archibald was under cover as an official of the U.S. State Department at the time.

There’s a contradiction built into every campaign promise about transparent government beyond the failure to keep the promises. Our government is, in significant portion, made up of secret operations, operations that include warmaking, kidnapping, torture, assassination, and infiltrating and overthrowing governments. A growing movement is ready to see that end.

The Central Intelligence Agency is central to our foreign policy, but there is nothing intelligent about it.

The latest out of Moscow is really embarrassing. Had someone at the embassy or in the FSB been watching FX’s Reagan-era spy melodrama The Americans and actually thought this would work? It’s hard to believe even thirty years ago those wigs would have passed, but today? Come on, really?

A high court in Pakistan has found that United States drone strikes carried out in Pakistan by the CIA are war crimes, which are “absolutely illegal” and a “blatant violation” of Pakistan’s state sovereignty.

The decision comes in a lawsuit filed by the Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR), a legal charity in Islamabad, which sued the Pakistan government for failing to protect its own citizens from US drone strikes.

The FBI has long been searching for a way to bypass the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which they have claimed makes their job difficult, increasingly so in the information age. Previously the FBI just broke the law and hoped it would not get caught. Now the agency wants a patina of legality to cover its transgressions against liberty.