MONDAY, JUNE 1 This week of transgender visibility, incriminating spit, and troubling Duggar fuckery kicked off in the United States of America, where the first second of today brought the expiration of the USA Patriot Act, the law rushed through Congress after 9/11 for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT, get it?) but which allowed for unconstitutional mass surveillance by the National Security Agency and the horrors of Abu Ghraib. And while much of the Patriot Act was revived under the USA Freedom Act, the section that previously allowed the NSA to collect phone data of virtually all Americans was amended to restrict such data collection to phone companies, from which the NSA can request specific information with a federal court’s imprimatur. For comment, we turn to Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed the NSA’s spying and was hit with espionage charges that may forever prevent his return to the country he wrecked his life to protect. “Though we have come a long way, the right to privacy—the foundation of the freedoms enshrined in the United States Bill of Rights—remains under threat,” Snowden wrote in a New York Times editorial. Among the Snowden-cited threats: the willingness of “the world’s most popular online services” to cooperate with the NSA in its mass surveillance and the billions of cell-phone location records still being intercepted with little restriction. Forever gracious, Snowden ended his editorial on a hopeful note…
