Update: The government has officially denied the report is true for whatever that is worth.

More evidence is accumulating that the Boston Bombing was entirely preventable. Despite spending more money since 9/11 on Homeland Security than was spent on the New Deal, the same problems that helped caused 9/11 still exist, namely, intelligence agencies dropping the ball after being given explicit actionable intelligence. And now we find out that not only had the Russian government warned U.S. intelligence services about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, so had the Saudis.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself and we are apparently very afraid. The ever mutating concept of “homeland security” has garnered more public funds since 9/11 than President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Pretty amazing, who knew fighting phantoms could be so expensive?

Often the most ardent critics of the American Empire are those who were once functionaries within in.

Melvin A. Goodman has seen the internal levers of imperial power projection at their worst and minces no words in describing the ugly side of the bipartisan consensus on empire in this nascent 400+ page tome.

President Barack Obama signed a major cybersecurity executive order hours before he delivered his State of the Union address. The order was highlighted in his address as he spoke about the current threat he believes the government faces from cyber-attacks.

Over a week ago, a federal judge ruled documents the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was ordered to produce in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit could not be subjected to a protective order.

The development has received minimal attention, but the case seems important, as the government sought to use an innovative tactic to provide documents it owed an organization while at the same time preventing the public from reading the documents. Had the judge allowed the protective order or “clawback,” it would have been a complete perversion of FOIA.

In any normal country, there would be no particular reason to expect 2013 to be an awful year. The right-wing Presidential candidate, who preached austerity, family values, and military adventurism, was soundly defeated by the center-left candidate, who favored, well, austerity-lite, personal freedom, and a fiscally convenient “peace dividend.” Overconfident and overfunded Republicans were similarly trounced in the House and Senate, losing seats in both despite stunning structural advantages.

It seemed that the Right’s perennial hobby horses, from favoring the wealthiest above all others and demonizing minorities of every type, to demanding that every non-military expenditure be slashed to the bone, had clearly been sent to the glue factory by the electorate. Alas, things are never what they seem in Washington.

In a bizarre press conference, NRA Chairman Wayne LaPierre called for the immediate placement of armed guards in all public schools. This is classic “fighting the last war” thinking, along with a dash of “think of the children” policymaking.

President Obama’s reelection has sparked an onslaught of analysis attempting to define the agenda for his second term. Will it reflect the vision of restoring liberty and security on which the president ran in 2008, or the disappointing passivity towards the national security state that characterized his first term?

More to the point, will President Obama’s legacy include emerging American authoritarianism, or instead the recovery of constitutional freedoms lost over the past decade?

A day after we hear about the disposition matrix, the drone wars and the militarization of the CIA, along comes Scott Shane to pose a question to all the same people who say we can’t afford to leave a legacy of debt to our children and grandchildren: uh, how do you plan to pay for all that?

A report from the Congressional Research Service was recently released and it looked at how law enforcement had been cracking down on animal rights and environmental activists. It highlighted how the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is used against activists.