NSA Spying Has a Disproportionate Effect on Immigrants -- The Atlantic "... the government contends that Americans who make phone calls or send emails to people abroad have a diminished expectation of privacy because the people with whom they are communicating—non-Americans abroad, that is—are not protected by the Constitution. The government also argues that Americans' privacy rights are further diminished in this context because the NSA has a "paramount" interest in examining information that crosses international borders. "... the government even argues that Americans can't reasonably expect that their international communications will be private from the NSA when the intelligence services of so many other countries ... might be monitoring those communications, too. The government's argument is not simply that the NSA has broad authority to monitor Americans' international communications. The US government is arguing that the NSA's author...

How Many People Are Wrongly Convicted? Researchers Do the Math. -- National Geographic "It’s impossible to say whether this 4.1 percent false conviction rate [among death row inmates] applies to defendants who never went to death row. But I’ll leave you with one last depressing thought. Of all of the people found guilty of capital murder, less than half actually get a death-penalty sentence. And when juries are determining whether to send a defendant to death row or to life in prison, surveys show that they tend to choose life sentences when they have 'residual doubt' about the defendant’s guilt. That means, then, that the rate of innocent defendants serving life in prison is higher than those on death row. 'They are sentenced,' the authors write, 'and then forgotten.'" Democracy's Deepening Recession -- The Atlantic "The democratic recession we're witnessing has been particularly visible in big 'swing states'—the non-Wes...