Where’s the Fear?

Police Powers in New York – NYTimes.com. The Police Department’s tendency toward blanket surveillance is on vivid display in its stop-and-frisk program, which results in the stopping of more than 600,000 mainly minority citizens on the streets every year. The department credits the program with reducing crime, but there is no proof that it does. A study carried out in connection with a federal lawsuit against the department has found that only about 6 percent of stops result in arrest and that less than 1 percent turn up weapons. In addition to criminalizing the victims of these stops, the program…

by Zoe Pollock Scott Horton interviewed father and son Charles and Gregory Fried about their book, Because It Is Wrong—Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror. Horton asked why they paired torture with privacy and surveillance: [After 9/11] the general public, and even the informed public, reacted as if both transgressions were equally serious and equally deserving of condemnation. Indeed, there may have been a markedly greater tolerance of torture than of surveillance—maybe because few of us expect to undergo torture, but all feel our phones or Internet may be tapped into. This gets things exactly wrong.…

The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart: 'There is no real hunt. It's fixed' | World news | guardian.co.uk. Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.