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Americans are dying at a shockingly high rate from preventable causes, found a first-of-its-kind global health study published late Thursday. The new research demonstrates that despite the fact that the U.S. has the largest economy in the world, healthcare for many of its residents is woefully inadequate. The U.S. was tied with Estonia and Montenegro, far below other wealthy nations such as Norway, Canada, and Australia, in the study’s ranking of 195 countries. “America’s ranking is an embarrassment, especially considering the U.S. spends more than $9,000 per person on health care annually, more than any other country,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, senior author of the study and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. “Anyone with a stake in the current healthcare debate, including elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels, should take a look at where the U.S. is falling short.”

Progressives have long pointed out that the U.S. is one of the only wealthy nations not to provide some form of government-mandated healthcare, exacerbating inequality in healthcare outcomes. The study published in the Lancet created a Healthcare Access and Quality (HAQ) Index, “a summary measure based on 32 causes, that in the presence of high-quality healthcare, should not result in death,” the researchers wrote. “Using deaths that could be avoided as a measure of the quality of a health system is not new but what makes this study so important is its scope, drawing on the vast data resources assembled by the Global Burden of Disease team to go beyond earlier work in rich countries to cover the entire world in great detail, as well as the development of a means to assess what a country should be able to achieve,” said Professor Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who participated in the study. Causes examined by the study include tuberculosis, diarrhea-related diseases, lower and upper respiratory infections, leukemia, breast cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, measles, tetanus, appendicitis, epilepsy, diabetes, and others. “The United States measures well for diseases preventable by vaccines, such as diphtheria and measles, but it gets almost failing grades for nine other conditions that can lead to death,” reported the Washington Post. “These are lower respiratory infections, neonatal disorders, non-melanoma skin cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, ischemic heart disease, hypertensive heart disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and the adverse effects of medical treatment itself.” “What we have found about healthcare access and quality is disturbing,” said Dr. Murray. “Having a strong economy does not guarantee good healthcare. Having great medical technology doesn’t either. We know this because people are not getting the care that should be expected for diseases with established treatments.”

The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America’s military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned. In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq’s war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.

Via the Tax Justice Network, I've just learned of a massive, multi-national joint investigation into secrecy jurisdictions by three very heavy hitters, the Guardian, BBC Panorama, and the U.S.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Though they are starting out with the United Kingdom and the seriously understudied situation in the British Virgin Islands, ICIJ has announced that this is just the start of a multi-year investigative project and that there are "many more countries to come in the next 12 months." Further, according to ICIJ, the investigation involves literally "dozens of jurisdictions and in collaboration with dozens of media partners and freelance journalists around the world" (emphasis in original).

As I write this, the first and second articles (Nov. 25 and 26) in the Guardian's series rank number two and number one in the "most viewed" articles in the last 24 hours. One of the most amazing articles discusses the use of "nominee" directors, people who pretend to be a company or foundation's directors in order to hide the true ownership from authorities. Incredibly, these nominee directors frequently do not know the companies they are supposedly responsible for; they just know that they are getting paid for the use of their names. Be sure to check out the BBC undercover film linked from this Guardian article.

But let's not forget: tax havens cost the middle class worldwide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue that they have to make up. The evidence is mounting that they are a central piece of the world financial system. Fundamental reform is necessary and a massive journalistic effort like this one will help produce the outrage to make it possible. I'm looking forward to more fruits of this investigation.

A federal appeals court ruled today that the Central Intelligence Agency cannot deny its "intelligence interest" in the targeted killing program and refuse to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests about the program while officials continue to make public statements about it. "This is an important victory. It requires the government to retire the absurd claim that the CIA's interest in the targeted killing program is a secret, and it will make it more difficult for the government to deflect questions about the program's scope and legal basis," said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, who argued the case before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Appeals Court in September. "It also means that the CIA will have to explain what records it is withholding, and on what grounds it is withholding them."

The ACLU's FOIA request, filed in January 2010, seeks to learn when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how and whether the U.S. ensures compliance with international law restricting extrajudicial killings. In September 2011, the district court granted the government's request to dismiss the case, accepting the CIA's argument that it could not release any documents because even acknowledging the existence of the program would harm national security. The ACLU filed its appeal brief in the case exactly one year ago, and today the appeals court reversed the lower court's ruling in a 3-0 vote. "We hope that this ruling will encourage the Obama administration to fundamentally reconsider the secrecy surrounding the targeted killing program," Jaffer said. "The program has already been responsible for the deaths of more than 4,000 people in an unknown number of countries. The public surely has a right to know who the government is killing, and why, and in which countries, and on whose orders. The Obama administration, which has repeatedly acknowledged the importance of government transparency, should give the public the information it needs in order to fully evaluate the wisdom and lawfulness of the government's policies." Today's ruling is at: aclu.org/national-security/drone-foia-appeals-court-ruling

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this "war" - the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) - should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired's Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US's national security editor) described the most significant exchange: "Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, 'At least 10 to 20 years.' . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today - atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America's Thirty Years War." That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the "war on terror" will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week's big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of "endless war". Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single greatest cause of that threat.

I wrote that the "war on terror" cannot and will not end on its own for two reasons: (1) it is designed by its very terms to be permanent, incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US (the operational definition of "terrorism"), and (2) the nation's most powerful political and economic factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation. Whatever else is true, it is now beyond doubt that ending this war is the last thing on the mind of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and those who work at the highest levels of his administration. Is there any way they can make that clearer beyond declaring that it will continue for "at least" another 10-20 years? The genius of America's endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America's innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates. Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world's largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?

Were Israeli companies Verint and Narus the ones that collected information from the U.S. communications network for the National Security Agency? The question arises amid controversy over revelations that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans every day, creating a database through which it can learn whether terror suspects have been in contact with people in the United States. It also was disclosed this week that the NSA has been gathering all Internet usage - audio, video, photographs, emails and searches - from nine major U.S. Internet providers, including Microsoft and Google, in hopes of detecting suspicious behavior that begins overseas.

According to an article in the American technology magazine "Wired" from April 2012, two Israeli companies – which the magazine describes as having close connections to the Israeli security community – conduct bugging and wiretapping for the NSA. Verint, which took over its parent company Comverse Technology earlier this year, is responsible for tapping the communication lines of the American telephone giant Verizon, according to a past Verizon employee sited by James Bamford in Wired. Neither Verint nor Verizon commented on the matter.

Natus, which was acquired in 2010 by the American company Boeing, supplied the software and hardware used at AT&T wiretapping rooms, according to whistleblower Mark Klein, who revealed the information in 2004. Klein, a past technician at AT&T who filed a suit against the company for spying on its customers, revealed a "secret room" in the company's San Fransisco office, where the NSA collected data on American citizens' telephone calls and Internet surfing. Klein's claims were reinforced by former NSA employee Thomas Drake who testified that the agency uses a program produced by Narus to save the personal electrical communications of AT&T customers.  Both Verint and Narus have ties to the Israeli intelligence agency and the Israel Defense Forces intelligence-gathering unit 8200. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the 8200 unit, told Forbes magazine in 2007 that Comverse's technology, which was formerly the parent company of Verint and merged with it this year, was directly influenced by the technology of 8200. Ori Cohen, one of the founders of Narus, told Fortune magazine in 2001 that his partners had done technology work for the Israeli intelligence.

Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. "I am not afraid," he said calmly, "because this is the choice I've made."He predicts the government will launch an investigation and "say I have broken the Espionage Act and helped our enemies, but that can be used against anyone who points out how massive and invasive the system has become".

If you've been following the fallout from last week's NSA surveillance revelations, you may have seen repeated reference to a certain "recent MIT study." "Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility," published in Nature's Scientific Reports last year, has been cited by multiple media sources, including this one, as evidence for why -- contra Dianne Feinstein -- your metadata matters. Indeed, re-examined in light of the current headlines, the concerns raised by the study seem quite prescient. The paper's authors, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen, and Vincent D. Blondel of MIT and the Universite Catholique de Louvain, examined a dataset of 15 months of anonymous cell-phone data from 1.5 million people in a "small European country." (They're a bit coy about how they obtained the data.) There were no names, addresses, or phone numbers in the data, yet they argue that "if individual's patterns are unique enough, outside information can be used to link the data back to an individual." In fact, just four points of observation -- time of the call and the nearest cell-phone tower -- were enough to identify 95 percent of individuals in the database.

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region. For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years.  Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for  2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.

Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power.  Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.

But then there's the mantra PRISM has been essential to foil major terrorist plots; that has been thoroughly debunked. [4] What is never acknowledged is that PRISM is TIA in action. Anyone - with the right clearance - may use TIA to amass serious inside financial information and make staggering profits. So yes, follow the money.

Snowden is surfing the PR tsunami as a master - and controlling it all the way. Yes, you do learn a thing or two at the CIA. The timing of the disclosure was a beauty; it handed Beijing the ultimate gift just as President Obama was corralling President Xi Jinping in the California summit about cyber war. As David Lindorff nailed it, [5] now Beijing simply cannot let Snowden hang dry. It's culture; it's a matter of not losing face. And then Snowden even doubled down - revealing the obvious; as much as Beijing, if not more, Washington hacks as hell. [6] Following the money, the security privatization racket and Snowden's moves - all at the same time - allows for a wealth of savory scenarios ... starting with selected players embedded in the NSA-centric Matrix node making a financial killing with inside information. Snowden did not expose anything that was not already known - or at least suspected - since 2002. So it's business as usual for those running the game. The only difference is the (Digital Blackwater) Big Brother is Watching You ethos is now in the open. TIA, a bunch of wealthy investors and a sound business plan - privatized Full Spectrum Dominance - all remain in play. From now on, it's just a matter of carefully, gradually guiding US public opinion to fully "normalize" TIA. After all, we're making all these sacrifices to protect you.

In addition to constructing the Stellar Wind center, and then running the operation, secretive contractors with questionable histories and little oversight were also used to do the actual bugging of the entire U.S. telecommunications network. According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008. Verint did not return a call seeking comment, while Verizon said it does not comment on such matters. At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment. What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.

In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis.” Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t. “In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said. “For access.”

But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later, four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.” Narus was formed in Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’s Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the chief technology officer.

The "Friends of Syria" are appalled. Their much vaunted "rebel held" stronghold of Qusayr is gone. This BBC headline sums it all up: "Syria conflict: US condemns siege of Qusayr." For White House spokesman Jay Carney, "pro-government forces", to win, needed help from by their "partners in tyranny" - Hezbollah and Iran. Right: so the "rebels" weaponized by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the CIA, not to mention jihadis of the Jabhat al-Nusra kind, are partners in what, "freedom and democracy"? Spin out, facts in. This is a monster strategic defeat for the NATO-Gulf Cooperation Council-Israel axis. [1] The supply lines from <a href='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a9473bc7&cb=%n' target='_blank'><img src='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=36&cb=%n&n=a9473bc7&ct0=%c' border='0' alt='' ></a> Lebanon to Homs of the Not Exactly Free Syrian Army (FSA) gangs and the odd jihadi are gone. The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) will next move to Homs and the whole Homs governorate. The final stop will be two or three Aleppo suburbs still controlled by the FSA. There's absolutely no way Qusayr can be spun in the West as yet another "tactical withdrawal" by the FSA. The rebels insist they "withdrew". Nonsense. It was a rout.

This, in a nutshell, is how it happened.

When will the NATO-GCC axis ever learn? Hezbollah's Sheikh Nasrallah staked his reputation by going on air and promising a victory. Once again, he delivered. Contrary to Western spin, Hezbollah did not do it by itself; it was a combination of SAA, Hezbollah and Iranian specialists applying superior tactics and displaying crack urban warfare knowledge. It's also easy to forget that a prime wet dream among US Think Tanklanders these past few months was the possibility of pitting Hezbollah against al-Qaeda-linked jihadis inside Syria. They got their wish.

It’s getting hot in Luxembourg, a nation that’s something like Cyprus on steroids. Its population is smaller and its banking sector is bigger. If you thought it was risky for banks in Cyprus to have assets about eight times the national gross domestic product, then what is one to make of Luxembourg, where the multiple is nearly 23?Worryingly for Luxembourg, there’s a new idea afloat that European Union nations, even small ones, should take responsibility for saving banks operating within their borders, instead of falling back on the EU for help.

Suddenly, she found herself in serious trouble. The inspection officer found the bills and accused her of “lying to a federal officer.” They held her for two hours as she was interrogated about the details of her life.  The officer ordered her to turn her phone on, and then proceeded to read her e-mails, texts, and Facebook messages without her permission.  She was shocked. Eventually, Gaczkowska was released, but she wondered if this was a common practice. As it turns out – it is; thousands of people every year face a similar situation.  Our government agencies have allowed themselves the right to search and seize your electronic devices with stunning impunity. Just two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security quietly released a strangely worded document reaffirming their own right to search and seize your electronics without suspicion or cause, anywhere along the United States border (which they define as 100 miles in from the border – an area twice as long as Rhode Island).  In reality, this is nothing new, Homeland Security been doing this since at least 2009; That’s when Secretary Napolitano put her stamp on the Bush-era practice, and promised an impact assessment within 120 days.  Over two years later, it’s finally here, and it is nothing more than a poorly written press release.

Having a government official force their way into your laptop is fundamentally different from having them inspect your suitcase.  Our hard drives contain personal correspondence, intimate details, deep logs of our activities, and sensitive financial or medical information.  Yet we still give this less legal privacy protection than a sealed envelope with a stamp on it.

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution already provides us with protection against unreasonable search and seizures for people in their “persons, houses, papers, and effects” – is it time that we add “data” to this list? The way in which we go about answering this question will have enormous ramifications for our entire legal system. Courts around the country are struggling to decide how to balance security with privacy.  From school to the workplace, this question is popping up in different ways almost every day.

Borrowers are discovering that their foreclosed homes are coming back to haunt them -- long after they have moved out. In these "zombie foreclosures," borrowers move out after their bank schedules a foreclosure auction only to learn months or years later that the auction never took place or the bank never transferred the deed. That means the borrower still technically owns the house and is on the hook for property taxes, fees and homeowners' association dues. Since the housing bubble burst seven years ago, almost two million properties have started but never completed the foreclosure process, according to RealtyTrac. While no one knows the exact number, it's estimated that tens of thousands could be zombie foreclosures. Many of these homes are in low-income communities where foreclosures are so difficult to sell that lenders sometimes delay taking possession to save on taxes and other costs that then stay under the borrower's name. Those debts can then go unpaid for years because the borrower is unaware they owe them, further slamming their credit score and making life after foreclosure even harder.

For Mitt Romney, it's one scary Halloween.  The Presidential candidate has just learned that tomorrow afternoon (November 1) he will be charged by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and other public interest groups with violating the federal ethics in government law by improperly concealing his multi-million dollar windfall from the auto industry bailout. At a press conference in Toledo, Bob King, President of the United Automobile Workers, will announce that his union and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)  have filed a formal complaint with the US Office of Government Ethics in Washington stating that Gov. Romney improperly hid a profit of $15.3 million to $115.0 million in Ann Romney's so-called "blind" trust. The union chief says, "The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue. It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.” “While Romney was opposing the rescue of one of the nation’s most important manufacturing sectors, he was building his fortunes with his Delphi investor group, making his fortunes off the misfortunes of others,” King added.

The Romneys' gigantic windfall was hidden inside an offshore corporation inside a limited partnership inside a trust which both concealed the gain and reduces taxes on it.   The Romneys' windfall was originally exposed in Nation Magazine (and reposted on Truthout,) Mitt Romney's Bail-out Bonanza after a worldwide investigation by our crew at The Guardian, the Nation Institute and the Palast Investigative Fund.  

According to ethics law expert Dr. Craig Holman of Public Citizen -- who serves as an advisor on the charge -- Ann Romney does not have a federally-approved blind trust.  An approved "blind" trust may not be used to hide a major investment which could be affected by Romney if he were to be elected President.

Recent revelations about the extent of surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency come as no surprise to those with a technical background in the workings of digital communications. The leaked documents show how the NSA has taken advantage of the increased use of digital communications and cloud services, coupled with outdated privacy laws, to expand and streamline their surveillance programs. This is a predictable response to the shrinking cost and growing efficiency of surveillance brought about by new technology. The extent to which technology has reduced the time and cost necessary to conduct surveillance should play an important role in our national discussion of this issue.

What we have learned about the NSA’s capabilities suggests a move toward programmatic, automated surveillance previously unfathomable due to limitations of computing speed, scale, and cost. Technical advances have both reduced the barriers to surveillance and increased the NSA’s capacity for it. We need to remember that this is a trend with a firm lower bound. Once the cost of surveillance reaches zero we will be left with our outdated laws as the only protection. Whatever policy actions are taken as a result of the recent leaks should address the fact that technical barriers such as cost and speed offer dwindling protection from unwarranted government surveillance domestically and abroad.

Almost 15 years ago, as I was just finishing a book about the relationship between the Net (we called it “cyberspace” then) and civil liberties, a few ideas seemed so obvious as to be banal: First, life would move to the Net. Second, the Net would change as it did so. Gone would be simple privacy, the relatively anonymous default infrastructure for unmonitored communication; in its place would be a perpetually monitored, perfectly traceable system supporting both commerce and the government. That, at least, was the future that then seemed most likely, as business raced to make commerce possible and government scrambled to protect us (or our kids) from pornographers, and then pirates, and now terrorists. But another future was also possible, and this was my third, and only important point: Recognizing these obvious trends, we just might get smart about how code (my shorthand for the technology of the Internet) regulates us, and just possibly might begin thinking smartly about how we could embed in that code the protections that the Constitution guarantees us. Because—and here was the punchline, the single slogan that all 724 people who read that book remember—code is law. And if code is law, then we need to be as smart about how code regulates us as we are about how the law does so.

There is, after all, something hopeful about a future that was smart about encoding our civil liberties. It could, in theory at least, be better. Better at protecting us from future Nixons, better at securing privacy, and better at identifying those keen to commit crime.

But what astonishes me is that today, more than a decade into the 21st century, the world has remained mostly oblivious to these obvious points about the relationship between law and code. That’s the bit in the Edward Snowden interview that is, to me, the most shocking. As he explained to Glenn Greenwald: The NSA specially targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system, and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest and the most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends ... Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone—from you [the reporter, Glenn Greenwald], to your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president if I had a personal email. We don’t know yet whether Snowden is telling the truth. Lots of people have denied specifics, and though his interview is compelling, just now, we literally don’t know. But what we do know are the questions that ought to be asked in response to his claims. And specifically, this: Is it really the case that the government has entrusted our privacy to the good judgment of private analysts? Are there really no code-based controls for assuring that specific surveillance is specifically justified? And what is the technology for assuring that rogues paid by our government can’t use data collected by our government for purposes that none within our government would openly and publicly defend?