Last summer, after months of encrypted emails, I spent three days in Moscow hanging out with Edward Snowden for a Wired cover story. Over pepperoni pizza, he told me that what finally drove him to leave his country and become a whistleblower was his conviction that the National Security Agency was conducting illegal surveillance on every American. Thursday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York agreed with him.

In a long-awaited opinion, the three-judge panel ruled that the NSA program that secretly intercepts the telephone metadata of every American — who calls whom and when — was illegal. As a plaintiff with Christopher Hitchens and several others in the original ACLU lawsuit against the NSA, dismissed by another appeals court on a technicality, I had a great deal of personal satisfaction.

It's now up to Congress to vote on whether or not to modify the law and continue the program, or let it die once and for all. Lawmakers must vote on this matter by June 1, when they need to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

Standard Operating Procedure 303 is designed to be used to cut cell service during emergencies. However, some electronic freedom organizations are demanding the details of the program be revealed.

US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia won't require the US to disclose its surreptitious policy regarding a cell service disabling plan.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), filed suit after being refused a FOIA request. A federal court has denied their request but EPIC appealed. The court of appeals declined, issuing a one-sentence decision.

"Upon consideration of appellee's petition for rehearing en banc, the response thereto, and the absence of a request by any member of the court for a vote, it is ORDERED that the petition be denied," they wrote.


The government had argued that the Department of Homeland Security is authorized to withhold documents from a FOIA if their exposure could "endanger" public safety.

EPIC had demanded documents related to 303 in 2011 following the blocking of cell service in the San Francisco Bay Area subway system during a protest. The DHS refused.

In the world of psychopaths there are different levels of functioning. The lowest functioning psychopaths have weak impulse control. They get caught when they lose control and have rage episodes, often violently assaulting others.

Better functioning psychopaths don't lose control of their temper but they're not that smart in their predatory behavior. They get caught ripping people off, lying, manipulating.

Then there are the smartest psychopaths. They almost never get caught, and when they do, they are often so ensconced behind the barriers of wealth, power and influence that they are untouchable-- too big for jail. Perhaps they are so big that their actions are not even seen as psychopathic.They are often rewarded and honored, their ruses are so effective.

The book and movie, The Corporation, describes how corporations fit the profile of psychopaths in many ways. Corporations get away every day with psychopathic behavior. I would argue that most billionaires also engage in what must be defined as psychopathic behavior.

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Honore de Balzac

Balzac nails it. Look close enough at EVERY billionaire and there is crime, certainly not caught and convicted crime, but crime nonetheless. Billionaires have become, like bankers, too big to prosecute. But it's not just criminality that is the problem with billionaires. They have so much power that they engage in manipulation at massive levels. Remember, small time psychopaths and narcissists routinely rip people off. Women are often victims of charismatic psychopaths who empty their bank accounts, sell their homes out from under them and put them into massive credit card debt. That's small time.

The scale of destruction for billionaires and the corporations they run is so, so much bigger it's hard to get your head around it. Think about the pyramids-- massive edifices that cost thousands of lives of slaves. Built for psychopaths. Today's billionaires and corporate heads can be just as bad, but less overt in the megalomaniacal predations.

The US has signed a $1 billion loan guarantee deal with Ukraine, and is prepared to consider giving additional loan guarantees of up to $1 billion at the end of 2015 if Ukraine continues implementing economic reforms and cooperating with the Congress.

A US-born Finance Minister Natalie Yaresko signed the agreement on behalf of Ukraine, while the US government was represented by US Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt and USAID's Ukraine director Jed Barton.

"If Ukraine continues to make concrete steps to implement economic reforms and will also meet certain conditions of cooperation with the Congress, we will consider the possibility of providing additional loan guarantees of up to $1 billion at the end of 2015," Pyatt said in Kiev Monday after the signing ceremony.

Germany, France and Italy have agreed to start a European drone program aimed at reducing reliance on US and Israeli technology. The first EU-tailored drone is expected to be operating by 2025.


"It's a very important step for European cooperation, a critical cooperation which we must have at our disposal in many theaters of operation," French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said at a joint signing ceremony alongside his German and Italian counterparts.

The three EU states decided to cooperate on a joint project to build an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in 2013. On Monday, they agreed to a two-year technical assessment to lay the basis for a European drone, which is scheduled to be operating in 10 years.

According to unconfirmed reports, the American Psychological Association is frantically searching for facts that have escaped from the Association's headquarters in Washington, DC. All of the fugitive facts apparently share one characteristic in common: they support claims that the APA colluded with the CIA and the White House in the Bush Administration's abusive detention and interrogation operations.

A distraught APA spokesperson advised that such facts are extremely dangerous on the loose. She warned that no one should approach them until they have been captured, tranquilized, and defanged by the APA's public affairs office. "We need to turn them into mere allegations as quickly as possible," she was overheard telling an unidentified colleague. "Obviously, we can't refute facts!"

Despite repeated requests, members of the APA leadership have thus far declined to comment further. The total number of escaped facts is not yet known, but it appears that dozens of them had been tunneling their way out of APA headquarters for over a decade. Others reportedly still remain securely confined in APA and government custody.

Hundreds of mobilized soldiers on Monday blocked the military posts at a Yavorov firing range in western Ukraine's Lviv region, the scene of the Ukrainian-US exercises, demanding to be given uniform and footwear, local media reports have said.

"People were mobilized two weeks ago, but they still look like "tramps." Men complain that no one deals with them although they do not want to sit idle and claim that over the past 14 days they have fired just 10 rounds of ammunition," a source told the Segodnya newspaper.

The incident has prevented the civil personnel working at the training site from reaching their workplace, a source said.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, or FAZ, has dedicated an article to Sputnik News, dismissing it as a "propaganda channel" under the headline "All the news to Putin's taste". Funny, because many readers probably know FAZ as "that awful German newspaper that was infiltrated by the CIA."

The Frankfurt-based daily, peddling news to Washington's taste, writes: "After the news channel 'Russia Today' there is now a new Putin media toy. The digital web satellite of the Kremlin is called 'Sputnik News'. It will provide the world with Russian propaganda".

To dismiss Russian news as propaganda has been German mainstream media's favorite pastime since the Ukraine crisis began. Here is what FAZ calls news, massaging the causes that led to the Odessa tragedy on 2 May, 2014:

The EU is increasingly becoming weaker and unable to control processes taking place on its soil. The European continent is becoming a playground for two major powers - the US and Russia - which seek to expand their influence in the region.

The EU is no longer able to control processes taking place on the European continent as its policy is dictated by the US-led NATO, and its governments are mere audience members, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten reported.

According to the newspaper, Angela Merkel's government is weakened because of the spying scandal, while the EU itself is no longer a community of values, but a purely economic community, in which all parties are trying to balance their respective egoism.

If the government fails to tackle the problems confronting Ukraine, it needs to be replaced, a battalion commander-turned-MP warned in televised comments Friday.

"Unfortunately, I haven't seen any real changes happening here since August of last year, where it comes to our national security, defense or economics," Semen Semenchenko, the ex-commander of the Donbass voluntary battalion and now a Verkhovna Rada deputy, said during the Shuster Live talk show aired on Friday.

If the state fails to perform its constitutional duties then "it's time for the people to join in the process of governance," Semenchenko said.