The Banality of Systemic Evil – The New York Times

A recent poll showed that 70 percent of people aged 18 to 34 thought Edward Snowden “did a good thing.” Has the younger generation lost its moral compass?

No. In my view, just the opposite.

A good illustration of this phenomenon appears in “Moral Mazes,” a book by the sociologist Robert Jackall that explored the ethics of decision making within several corporate bureaucracies. In it, Jackall made several observations that dovetailed with those of Arendt. The mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of corporate life”:

(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.

Source: The Banality of Systemic Evil – The New York Times

Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens | Glenn Greenwald | Opinion | The Guardian

The president’s partisan lawyers purport to vest him with the most extreme power a political leader can seize

when this memo refers to “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida”, what it actually means is this: someone whom the President – in total secrecy and with no due process – has accused of being that.

the memo isn’t justifying the due-process-free execution of senior al-Qaida leaders who pose an imminent threat to the US. It is justifying the due-process-free execution of people secretly accused by the president and his underlings, with no due process, of being that. The distinction between (a) government accusations and (b) proof of guilt is central to every free society, by definition, yet this memo – and those who defend Obama’s assassination power – willfully ignore it.

Source: Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens | Glenn Greenwald | Opinion | The Guardian

The Hidden Classified Briefing Most of Congress Missed – The Atlantic

The wild story of the short-notice, three-hour viewing period for a national-security document on the August Friday that summer recess started

Source: The Hidden Classified Briefing Most of Congress Missed – The Atlantic

 

Yet another example of how the national security edifice stands in the way of duly elected officials governing by withholding information from them in every way legally permitted or unlikely to be discovered.

How to tell your mother and bosses why they should protest surveillance.

The people who want to spy on and store everything we say and do have created a singular advantage in their propaganda campaign for total surveillance——a slogan designed to shut down the debate before it begins. Here it is: “Terrorists will kill your children.”

Can we counter the dire warnings and slippery logic with language that is both truthful and pro-liberty?

Source: How to tell your mother and bosses why they should protest surveillance.

NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration | WIRED

Most of what humanity knows about the outer planets came back to Earth on plutonium power. Cassini’s ongoing exploration of Saturn, Galileo’s trip to Jupiter, Curiosity’s exploration of the surface of Mars, and the 2015 flyby of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft are all fueled by plutonium-238. The characteristics of this metal’s radioactive decay make it a super-fuel. More importantly, there is no other viable option. But there’s a problem: We’ve almost run out.

Source: NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration | WIRED