The Nation September 2-9, 2013

Big Brother: Watching, Listening and… Washington, D.C. We enjoyed the excellent insights in your “The End of Privacy” issue [July 8/15]. But before packing up all our data for Big Brother, how about a little resistance? The Electronic Privacy Information Center has petitioned NSA director Keith Alexander for a public rule-making on the agency’s decision to do domestic surveillance. This is the kind of change in agency activity that triggers the public comment process required by the Administrative Procedure Act. We will be renewing our petition weekly. To sign on, go to epic.org/NSApetition or #NSApetition. MARC ROTENBERG, president KHALIAH BARNES, counsel, Electronic Privacy Information Center _________________________ Mercer Island, Wash. Thank you, thank you, thank you for Jonathan Schell’s unequivocal condemnation of the government’s invasion of our privacy and its complete…

When New York City Democrats head to the polls on September 10 to choose their party’s nominee for mayor, they will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rewrite the narrative of their city. After twelve years, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose mix of technocratic efficiency and top-down urbanism has come to define the city, is leaving office. For voters, this means a new opening to debate some of the most critical 
issues of the day, from policing to economic development to hurricane recovery. More fundamentally, it also means a chance to revisit the meaning of the city itself, to ask: What kind of city do we want New York to be? A city for the few, or a city for the many?
 Among this year’s Democratic contenders, several have made thoughtful…

A HISTORIC FOOTNOTE: In a landmark ruling on August 12, a federal judge ruled that the New York Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy is unconstitutional and racially discriminatory. In her Floyd v. City of New York decision, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin determined that stop-and-frisk constitutes “a policy of indirect racial profiling,” noting that “blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be subjected to the use of force than whites, despite the fact that whites are more likely to be found with weapons or contraband.”
 Remarkably, in a footnote to her decision, Scheindlin invoked an investigative documentary video published by TheNation.com last year featuring Alvin Cruz, a teenager who recorded himself being stopped in Harlem in 2011. 
 “It appears to be the only known recording of a stop by a…

“Putin signs anti-gay legislation into law.” —news reports It’s possible a skier’d have to pray, As he zoomed down the steepest slope one day, That he did not, by accident, display A manner that those eager to obey The laws that under Putin now hold sway Might video as evidence, then say This shows with certainty that he is gay, Illegally, and must be sent away To some gay gulag, where he will decay In dungeons like the cages of Bombay. And meanwhile Putin leads the cheers: “Let’s hear it! Let’s celebrate that grand Olympic spirit!”…

They carried signs that demanded “Voting Rights,” “Jobs for All” and “Decent Housing.” They protested the vigilante killing of an unarmed black teenager in the South and his killer’s acquittal. They denounced racial profiling in the country’s largest city. 
 This isn’t 1963 but 2013, when so many of the issues that gave rise to the March on Washington fifty years ago remain unfulfilled or under siege today. That’s why, on August 24, a broad coalition of civil rights organizations, unions, progressive groups and Democratic Party leaders will rally at the Lincoln Memorial and proceed to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the march and dramatize the contemporary fight. (President Obama will participate in a separate event commemorating the official anniversary on August 28.)…

The sale of The Washington Post has inspired a predictable avalanche of emotion about the end of the good old days of famous families owning great newspapers. The Sulzbergers alone remain, but their newspaper, The New York Times, is sui generis: a global brand that has the kind of readership that advertisers covet and information for which at least a million people will pay hundreds of dollars. With the possible exception of The Wall Street Journal, which has been weakened but not quite ruined by its current owner, Rupert Murdoch, no other American newspaper can imagine itself occupying such territory. The Post may have had such a chance at the beginning of the Internet era, but Donald Graham and his advisers bet wrong—on metropolitan saturation coupled with national and international…