Privacy has an image problem. Over and over again, regardless of the forum in which it is debated, it is cast as old-fashioned at best and downright harmful at worst — anti-progressive, overly costly, and inimical to the welfare of the body politic. Yet the perception of privacy as antiquated and socially retrograde is wrong. It is the result of a conceptual inversion that relates to the way in which the purpose of privacy has been conceived. Like the broader tradition of liberal political theory within which it is situated, legal scholarship has conceptualized privacy as a form of protection for the liberal self. Its function is principally a defensive one; it offers shelter from the pressures of societal and technological change. So characterized, however, privacy is reactive and ultimately inessential.

The most recent denunciation from Syria confirms the support of Western powers to the alleged humanitarian organization of the White Helmets which is also a fraud of crude media manipulation.

Trump’s pardon of the Blackwater mercenaries who murdered 14 Iraqi civilians at Nisour Square shows the world what justice means in the United States.

For thirty-five years, it has been the support of committed individuals like you that has kept our mission moving forward. The more associate members we can count, the better we can defend everyone's freedoms against the largest companies and governments on the planet, and this starts with achieving our fall goal of 500 new members. Share the free software message using the hashtag #UserFreedom on social media networks, and help fuel the free software movement today.

Trump's brazen pardon of four mercenaries jailed for massacring unarmed civilians during the US-led occupation of Iraq is just one way in which this lawless president seeks to cement his legacy.

As we feared, the “Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act”—the CASE Act—that we’ve been fighting in various forms for two years has been included in a "must-pass" spending bill. This new legislation means Internet users could face up to $30,000 in penalties for sharing a meme or making a video, with liability determined not by neutral judges but by biased bureaucrats.

Michael Robert's reviews of books this year.

Leo Panitch, who died on Saturday, defended working-class politics even in times when many of his colleagues succumbed to neoliberal triumphalism. His work had a political, not just academic, purpose — and its message will survive among the generation of socialists whose thinking he shaped.