You can hardly point out that the Emperor has no clothes if you're not even allowed to look in his direction. And that's precisely the point of the government's war on whistleblowers. The message couldn't be more clear or more authoritarian: Avert your eyes, citizens!

Most of us want both peaceful, secure communities and a fundamental respect for civil liberties. Let's look at four highly visible, often controversial elements of law enforcement's quest to ensure safety and security at public gatherings.

Don't be fooled. Both liberals and conservatives are always keen on limiting your freedoms, while clouding up your vision of this by arguing that the other has a monopoly on those limits.

A week after the Boston Marathon bombings, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds mixed support for increased surveillance of Americans. According to th...

Following the horrific events at the Boston Marathon, Facebook posts revealed an additional horror: many posters were once again willing to abandon civil protections and principles in a vain effort to stop all terrorism.

As a Bostonian, I have complex feelings about my civil liberties and my family's personal safety in the aftermath of the Marathon bombings. My wife was a block from the first explosion. My son and four-year-old grandson had considered going to the finish line but then changed their plans. The dead and maimed could have been any of us. But I fear for my country on two opposite grounds. The emerging history of Dzohkahr Tsarnaev suggests that while the much-expanded national security establishment has been largely successful at thwarting organized assaults by terrorists, it cannot prevent a one-off attack by an extremist-influenced sociopath. To do so would require turning our country into a police state. How many more of us will have to be presumed enemies of the state in order for the rest of us to be safe from random bombers? After an attack like this, national security ratchets up, and never seems to ratchet back down.

Our ability to look at the constitutional rights and ask what the framers meant -- through modern eyes -- is what makes this nation the world's great experiment.

As the drug war escalated in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the crack epidemic, police in some cities began raiding entire neighborhoods. The...

It may be that the time has come to create a "non-political" and "independent" attorney general, one who would serve the interests of the public by upholding the rule of law rather than justifying the whims of the president.

Gene Healy has been one of the more prominent and consistent critics of presidential power going back to the Clinton administration. (Disclosure: Heal...

It's always a good idea to keep a tenacious eye on government authority. But if we, as citizens and activists, want to be taken as grown-ups, it seems to me as if we need to pick our battles wisely.

Both the administration and members of Congress have stated that the goal is to provide government and the private sector with robust tools to fight cybersecurity threats while still protecting individuals' civil liberties and privacy rights. But their bill fails the test.

And when countries are under attack, the space for civil liberties diminishes. Sometimes that's for legitimate reasons, and sometimes it's not and is opportunistic on the part of would-be authoritarians. But it's essentially a law of nature; it always happens.

At a time when Americans are even more disgusted than usual with Washington's inability to handle their own manufactured crises, Paul has demonstrated the positive power that one legislator can have on a specific issue.

The lack of nuance, as well as the lack of a sense of history on both the far-right (and the far-left for that matter) is eerily coincidental. It's important to have oversight on drones, but let's get real here.

The Obama administration's decision to try Osama bin Laden's son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, in civilian court highlights deep fundamental disagreement about how to bring foreign nationals captured overseas and accused of terrorism to justice.

The most positive outcome of Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster was giving the American public a sense of the treacherous path that President Obama's drone program could take. The biggest flaw, however, was Rand's refusal to strongly condemn the way drones are already being used.