The ongoing protests in Ferguson one year after the shooting of Michael Brown highlight the elevated risks that African Americans face when interacting with police in the US.

Capital punishment is such a costly, controversial, and divisive issue that, unless it succeeds in saving lives, it clearly should be abolished – as it already has been in the European Union and in 101 countries around the world. But does the death penalty save lives? Let’s consider the relevant factors and the evidence.

EU’s economic demands seek to derail small business and local communities, paving the way for multinational corporate giants. One demand is that Greece abolish any laws restricting the days or hours a business can operate despite the fact that several European countries including have enacted such policies to protect workers and small business, including Germany.

In recent years, an increasingly bipartisan consensus around prison reform has begun to take shape, uniting policymakers in Congress who are typically on opposite sides of law-and-order issues

The expiration of key provisions of the US Patriot Act – and the passage of the USA Freedom Act – has renewed interest in the trade-offs between civil liberties and security. To what extent are American citizens willing to concede their civil liberties to the government in order to feel safe and secure from terrorism?

Prison populations in Australia are increasing rapidly. This is usually said to be driven by increases in crime. Digging deeper though, in Australia and internationally, the link is far less clear. The extent of a country’s use of imprisonment seems in fact to be more a matter of policy choice than of necessity.

By now, no one is insulated from hearing about incidents of police shootings or violence against police officers. While fatal shootings are thankfully still rare events, this does not diminish the emotional impact of hearing about a violent death.

Like green-shaded teflon dons – mobster John Gotti’s nickname for managing to stay out of jail – the largest banks have been repeatedly prosecuted over the past decade and yet have so far avoided any harsher consequences. Instead they’ve received “deferred prosecutions” or non-prosecutions that trade criminal charges for promised reforms and criminal fines.

Last July 4, my family and I went to Long Island to celebrate the holiday with a friend and her family. After eating some barbecue, a group of us decided to take a walk along the ocean. The mood on the beach that day was festive. Giggling children chased each other along the boardwalk...

The apparent recurrence of intelligence failures in France and elsewhere has long been debated by security experts, and ultimately begs the question: what can be expected from intelligence services?

One of my most popular courses at Swarthmore College focused on the challenge of how to defend against terrorism, nonviolently. Events now unfolding in France make our course more relevant than ever. In fact, the international post-9/11 “war against terror” has been accompanied by increased actual threats of terror almost everywhere.

At this moment, there are likely many eyes on you. If you are reading this article in a public place, a surveillance camera might be capturing your actions and even watching you enter your login information and password. Suffice it to say, being watched is part of life today.

Facebook’s recent apology for its Year in Review feature, which had displayed to a grieving father images of his dead daughter, highlights again the tricky relationship between the social media behemoth and its users' data.

We’ve made progress this year — raising the minimum wage in dozens of states and cities, providing equal marriage rights in a majority of states, limiting carbon emissions. But there’s far more to do.

In a post-Snowden world, anonymity is what people want online. Smartphone apps offering anonymous messaging are popping up everywhere – Secret, Whisper, and now Yik Yak. The latest additions to privacy-protecting technology, they claim to provide anonymous, location-based confession, expression, and discussion platforms.

An artist tests whether New Yorkers will give away their mother’s maiden name or part of their Social Security number for a homemade cookie.

Municipal struggles over mass surveillance take on increased significance. As it becomes more and more clear that these agencies are wastefully overfunded, as a bipartisan 2012 report on fusion centers found, communities must decide whether to stand up for their civil liberties when elected officials are no longer able to advocate for them.

Recently, documents unveiled by ProPublica, the New York Times and the Guardian showed that the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, are not only capable of accessing your metadata but also capturing information sent by applications on your smartphone.

Since the first disclosures based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Obama has offered his own defenses of the programs. But not all of the president's claims have stood up to scrutiny. Here are some of the misleading assertions he has made.

The curious thing about a democratic system is that it contains the seeds of its own demise. Freedom is not something guaranteed by any parchment or promise. It is earned by each generation which must jealously protect it from threats, not only from outside, but from within a nation.

Soon after the very earliest reporting on Ed Snowden's leaked documents about PRISM, the folks from Datacoup put together the very amusing GETPRSM website, which looks very much like the announcement of a new social network, but (the joke is) it's really the NSA scooping up all our data and making the connections. It's pretty funny. Except, of course, when you find out that it's real.

Three-and-a-half months after National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden came public on the the U.S. government’s massive spying operations at home and abroad, we spend the hour with Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of The Guardian, the British newspaper that first reported on Snowden’s leaked documents.

It's not clear how much information about ordinary people's conversations the National Security Agency has gathered. But we do know there's a thriving public market for data on individual Americans -- especially data about the things we buy and might want to buy.