John W. Whitehead

"I declare that the Beatles are mutants, prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species."--Dr. Timothy Leary

Rolling Stone recently announced its top 500 pop music albums of all time. Perched at the top of the heap is the Beatles'...

"I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy... But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of...

"There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today. Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they've paid their price?" -- Bill Clinton

"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." --James Madison

Drones -- unmanned aerial vehicles -- come in all shapes and sizes, from nano-sized drones as small as a grain of sand that can do everything from conducting surveillance...

"We're not computers, Sebastian. We're physical." -- Roy Batty

Thirty years ago right around this time, Ridley Scott was wrapping up production on his film Blade Runner. By the summer of 1982, it had opened in over 1,200 theaters across the country. Routinely panned and even attacked by test audiences,...

"The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door. That's the only difference." -- Ralph Nader

The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC not only gave unfettered...

"Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today -- perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system -- in prison, on probation,...

In a devastating 5-4 ruling that not only condones an overreach of state power but legitimizes what is essentially state-sponsored humiliation and visual rape, the U.S. Supreme Court recently declared that any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her...

"Everybody's a target; everybody with communication is a target."--A senior intelligence official previously involved with the Utah Data Center

In the small town of Bluffdale, Utah, not far from bustling Salt Lake City, the federal government is quietly erecting what will be the crown jewel of its surveillance empire. Rising...

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us... But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and...

"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." -- First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

One of the key ingredients in a democracy is the...

You can't show war as it really is on the screen, with all the blood and gore. Perhaps it would be better if you could fire real shots over the audience's head every night, you know, and have actual casualties in the theater.

-- Sam Fuller, film director and author

On Feb. 27, a teenager -- reportedly a victim of bullying and something of a social outcast -- walked into a Cleveland high school and opened fire in the cafeteria, killing two students and wounding three others. The teenager, identified as T.J. Lane, has...

"Women might consider this bill a TSA pat-down inside their vagina."--Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

Contraception and abortion are shaping up to be mobilizing issues in this year's presidential election. From disputes over whether the federal health care mandate should cover contraception and abortion to state-led efforts...

"I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save...

"The First Amendment was intended to secure something more than an exercise in futility." -- Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting in Minnesota Board for Community Colleges v. Knight (1984)

Living in a representative democracy such as ours means that each person has the right to stand outside the...

In a unanimous 9-0 ruling in United States v. Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects. But what does this ruling, hailed as a victory by privacy advocates, really mean for the future...

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes... known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.... No...

"The drug war is not to protect the children, save the babies, shield the neighborhoods, or preserve the rain forests. The drug war is a violent campaign against black men and by extension the black family, among many others."-- Wilton D. Alston, "How Can Anyone Not Realize the...

"If we're training cops as soldiers, giving them equipment like soldiers, dressing them up as soldiers, when are they going to pick up the mentality of soldiers? If you look at the police department, their creed is to protect and to serve. A soldier's mission is to engage his enemy...