Human Rights

‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’

A bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans’ metadata is an important first step, but it addresses only one part of the NSA’s surveillance activities.

May 10, 2014

What the NSA Knows

“The NSA and its predecessors have been gaining secret, illegal access to the communications of Americans for nearly a century.”

August 15, 2013 issue

The Ears of America

“The National Security Agency was established by President Truman—secretly: its official charter has never been made public—in the fall of 1952, but its true origins go back to the First World War.”

February 3, 1983 issue

On NSA Spying: A Letter to Congress

We are scholars of constitutional law and former government officials. We write in our individual capacities as citizens concerned by the Bush administration’s National Security Agency domestic spying program…. The Justice Department’s defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law.

February 9, 2006 issue

‘People Are Not a Crisis’

Eric Adams has insisted that his administration is doing its best to house New York’s asylum seekers, but the city’s shortage of shelter space is the result of political choices.

July 23, 2023

Exiles

I recognize in these young people—driven from their homes by war, famine, poverty—an unshakable energy called Hope.

July 11, 2023

The Land of Dust and Plastic

In Almería, the Moroccan and West African migrant workers who sustain the region’s booming agriculture industry find themselves either neglected or persecuted by the state. 

June 24, 2023

Asylum in Limbo

Like the Trump-era policy it replaces, Biden’s new asylum ban suggests that certain migrants are less deserving of humanitarian protection than others. 

May 28, 2023