“Don’t expect Congress to protect you against all possible data invasions,” says Sergey Feldman, a data scientist, when asked to comment on “deep learning,” the latest frontier in computing. (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Lolocats?” by Dana Liebelson, Mother Jones, Sept

A blog reader wrote to thank me for sharing the latest PEW Research Center’s survey about Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. In the main, the attitudes expressed there were similar to those found in the PEN survey I discussed earlier. (Bog 12/2/13)  Snowden’s revelations about t

I have long been an admirer of the cold war’s great strategist, George Frost Kennan (See blog 1/4/2012).  He was the mastermind behind the policy of Russian containment after World War II and among the first to see that the atomic bomb had irrevocably changed the politics of war. 

When Senator Diane Feinstein expressed her outrage at Edward Snowden because he’d failed to take his concern about the NSA through the proper channels and reached out to the press,  she was guilty of short term memory loss. In 2001, William Binney, a 30 year-old veteran of the agen

While Edward Snowden cools his heels in the Russian winter, the world continues its heated debate on the good or ill he accomplished when he released volumes of information about NSA’s data mining. Few in this country are coming to the young man’s defense, though foreign leaders h

On Christmas eve I attended an annual luncheon with a few close friends and sat talking with a young woman whose career was in health services. “Can you imagine?” she asked, turning her wide, blue eyes in my direction. “People are making such a fuss over the NSA instead of the c

Jack Goldsmith isn’t worried about the NSA . He teaches at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law so he’s pretty confident about where the United States is going when it comes to its security agency. He predicts the cur

Given the anger the public has expressed since the bank debacle and the government’s bail out and the fact that polls show only 6% of the population approves of the job Congress is doing, I’m surprised at the nation’s apparent lack of concern about the National Security Agency�