Here is a brief study in contrast. The first video below shows a crowd destroying an NYPD squad car. No pepper spray, no arrests, nothing.
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It's hard to keep up with the two-pronged assault on our rights of late: technologies of control are flying out of research facilities, while the government continues to eat away at our rights to privacy and freedom. If you can handle all that, read on for the latest.
Back in December, I posted a blog recounting a truly bizarre experience: sitting in on what I thought would be an open court hearing, and instead witnessing the closing off of the judicial process to the public. We had gone to court to argue our motion to quash a Suffolk county district attorney subpoena to Twitter, seeking information about our client, John Doe, and information related to Occupy Boston.
Somebody get Ray Kelly on the phone. The massive, costly, invasive and discriminatory campaign of spying on Muslim Americans in New York City he has overseen has now additionally been proven useless.
In an otherwise stellar and incredibly important piece of reporting, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick makes a mistake that journalists have frequently made with regard to the wiretapping statute in Massachusetts. The piece begins:
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As many journalists and media watchdogs have observed, the political class has a funny relationship to leaks to the media. On the one hand, high profile people routinely leak information to the press to further their own interests. Rahm Emanuel practically made a career of it while working as Obama's Chief of Staff in the White House. 
Just a few days after President Obama for the first time publicly acknowledged the existence of the military drone program, Congress with bipartisan support passed legislation that will fill American airspace
Thursday technology links round-up
Online denizens: the government says you are better off passing out flyers in a ski mask than Tweeting controversial material
Radical Muslims pose “minuscule threat to public safety,” study finds
Once and for all: it’s not illegal to record police in Massachusetts!
The militarization of the police: ticker-tape style
Senators Brown, Lieberman and Ensign want to make (leaky) journalism illegal
