On the ten year anniversary of the September 11th attacks, an Ohio mother was flying on a Frontier Airlines flight from San Francisco to Detroit. The plane landed and heavily armed agents boarded the plane and removed her. She was handcuffed, pat searched and then strip searched and locked in a cell at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport. There she was interrogated and then released with no charges after being detained for four hours. She has now filed suit against Frontier Airlines and government agents and officers involved in arresting and detaining her without probable cause.

A man who was out drinking with his friends and decided it would be fun to race his jet ski has been arrested for criminal trespassing after breaching security at JFK Airport in New York. The breach occurred after his jet ski broke down in Jamaica Bay, and he swam three miles toward the lights he saw on a runway that sticks out into the bay. The security system never detected him.

The Ninth Circuit United States Court of Appeals reversed a ruling on July 26 that now allows the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) lawsuit against the heads of the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) to go forward. The court remanded it to the US District Court of Oregon, which previously had decided to dismiss the case over a technicality because the court believed it should have been filed against the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Dissenters’ Digest takes a look back at news stories covering whistleblowers, watchdogs, and government accountability.

Liars & Outliers explores some of the deeper principles on which social health depends. The subtitle of the book conveys the main theme: “Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.” It is a systematic assessment of the conditions that allow people to assume the best rather than the worst from the others they encounter during the day.

For most of us, the TSA is our only contact with the “war on terror.”

For the past two years, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been challenging the US government’s No-Fly List. It has raised objection to the secrecy surrounding the list and the fact that people, who are on the list, are typically not told why their name is on the list. The government also does not give those on the list a fair opportunity to have their name removed.

Now, the ACLU is taking a case against the government before a federal appeals court.

A look back at the week’s stories covering whistleblowers, watchdogs, and government accountability.

Back in January of 2010, there were allegations that Federal Air Marshals managers allegedly ridiculed lesbians, gays, and African-Americans, and the story was encapsulated in the imagery of the ‘Jeopardy Game Board’ from the Orlando Field Office of the Federal Air Marshals. As photographic evidence of the allegedly bigoted office climate, a “Jeopardy Game Board” — a mock-up of the Jeopardy game drawn with blue marker on a whiteboard — gays were allegedly referred to as “Pickle Smokers,” lesbians allegedly referred to as “creatures,” and African-Americans allegedly referred to by “Our Gang.”

As historian Jay Feldman describes in his brilliantly researched and artfully written new book, Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America, there have indeed been a great many things wrong with this country specifically with respect to government attacks on civil liberties. Feldman pulls together a jaw-dropping historical catalogue of 20th Century examples where the United States government not only trampled the Bill of Rights, but did so while whipping up class warfare, xenophobic hysteria, and political mob violence, all on the pretext that war or the threat of war necessitated the abrogation of liberty.