The NYPD’s roughly 34,500 officers serve a population of 8.2 million people, but multiple interviews with reporters who cover the police department, as well as organizations dedicated to transparency, reveal a police department stunning in its disregard for the information requests of citizens, advocacy groups and news organizations.

The city's Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who is running for mayor, recently released a report asserting that a third of all Freedom of Information records requests to the police department were ignored. The numbers are no surprise to journalists who cover the department, such as Leonard Levitt, a veteran cops reporter who now writes at NYPD Confidential.

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Time has the details, but the top line is:

When given a choice, 61 percent of Americans say they are more concerned about the government enacting new anti-terrorism policies that restrict civil liberties, compared to 31 percent who say they are more concerned about the government failing to enact strong new anti-terrorism policies.

Only 32 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. government can prevent all major attacks, down from an average of 40 percent in 2011 and 41 percent in 2006. And by contrast with polls taken in the wake of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, when only 23 percent of voters polled showed reluctance to give up civil liberties to protect terrorism, 49 percent said they were not willing to give up such rights, as opposed to 40 percent who were.

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Up until today, you might have been able to write all that anti-democratic pathology off as one infecting only the Republican Party's politicians and institutional leadership, but not its rank-and-file voters. But then this morning Fairleigh Dickinson University released this gun control-related pollshowing that authoritarianism runs throughout the the entire party.

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To that end, the several days since the bombing of the Boston Marathon showcased a mesmerizing display of reality television mediated by the unquestioning officiousness of the fourth estate. On vivid display was “proof through performance,” a validation that the laws passed and massive expenditures incurred over the last decade were essential to the state’s “protection of the public.”

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The brothers are ethnic Chechens who immigrated to America with their family and lived in the Boston area. Dzhokhar became an American citizen on September 11, 2012. Tamerlan’s efforts to become a citizen had not yet been successful. In 2012 he spent an extended period in Chechnya and Dagestan in Russia’s northern Caucus region, according to the New York Times.

The Boston Globe reported on how Tamerlan came to the FBI’s attention:

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Graham wasn't done, telling the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin (sigh): "This is Exhibit A of why the homeland is the battlefield.”

That is just the worst, dumbest, least helpful, wonderful (and totally predictable) response to a terror attack, Senator Graham. Making America "the battlefield" is sort of the point of terrorism (well, the point is also "killing Americans" and often "somehow causing America's foreign policy to change in a way that is actually the opposite of the way that terrorism always makes America's foreign policy change" but most terrorists aren't great strategic thinkers, that is why they fucking bomb civilians).

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The heavily redacted 252 pages of documents add to findings already made by the PCJF about coordination and intelligence monitoring by the DHS, the FBI, the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies and the private sector of Occupy and related protests.

"Taken together, the two sets of documents paint a disturbing picture of federal law enforcement agencies using their vast power in a systematic effort to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations. The federal agencies’ actions were not because Occupy represented a 'terrorist threat' or a 'criminal threat' but rather because it posed a significant grassroots political challenge to the status quo,” stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF.

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But his record on other civil rights and civil liberties issues has been mixed:

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The justices voted 5-4 that the plaintiffs, including journalist Chris Hedges and Amnesty International, lacked standing in the case -- arguing, essentially, that concerns about a legal framework that might allow for future surveillance were insufficient evidence of harm caused by the law. “They cannot manufacture standing by incurring costs in anticipation of non-imminent harms," wrote Justice Samuel Alito in the majority decision.

The plaintiffs had sought a First Amendment challenge against the FISA Amendments Act --  a law that retroactively legalized the government's warrantless wiretapping program, which had "begun in secret and without congressional authorization under the Bush administration," as HuffPo's Matt Sledge noted.  The law permitted the National Security Agency and other agencies to read emails and listen in to calls without a warrant when they are targeting foreign nationals.

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The reason for this, according to Friedersdorf, is that everyone hated Bush and knew he was incompetent, but people like Obama because he's clearly smart and conscientious, which causes people to defend actions they would have criticized under his predecessor:

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Lincoln is rightly held up as the paragon of the American presidency, so it makes sense that people would ask how he would handle a tough moral question like the use of unmanned killer drones, which has compelling arguments both for and against. WWLD? We consulted experts and the historical record to find out. The answer may surprise you.

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But Tesler found that the Obama effect worked the opposite way, too: African-Americans and white liberals who supported Obama became more likely to support policies once they learned the president did.

More than once I’ve worried that might carry over to bad policies that Obama has flirted with embracing, that liberals have traditionally opposed: raising the age for Medicare and Social Security or cutting those programs’ benefits. Or hawkish national security policies that liberals shrieked about when carried out by President Bush, from rendition to warrantless spying. Or even worse, policies that Bush stopped short of, like targeted assassination of U.S. citizens loyal to al-Qaida (or “affiliates”) who were (broadly) deemed (likely) to threaten the U.S. with (possible) violence (some day).

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The No-Fly List compiles more than 21,000 names (over 500 of American citizens) suspected of involvement with terrorist activity. If your name is on the list you can't fly into or out of the United States. As Hussain notes, echoing concerns expressed this week by the ACLU, "over the past decade there have been countless documented cases of individuals who have suddenly found themselves permanently stranded abroad after being banned from the United States despite holding legal residency and/or citizenship in the country." He writes:

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[T]he City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia, endorses the proposal for a two year moratorium on drones in the state of Virginia; and calls on the United States Congress and the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to adopt legislation prohibiting information obtained from the domestic use of drones from being introduced into a Federal or State court, and precluding the domestic use of drones equipped with anti-personnel devices, meaning any projectile, chemical, electrical, directed-energy (visible or invisible), or other device designed to harm, incapacitate, or otherwise negatively impact a human being; and pledges to abstain from similar uses with city-owned, leased, or borrowed drones.

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The 2013 World Report, a 665-page tome which assesses human rights progress in the past year in 90 countries, highlights particular issues undergirding the U.S.'s blighted carceral system. It notes that "practices contrary to human rights principles, such as the death penalty, juvenile life-without-parole sentences, and solitary confinement are common and often marked by racial disparities." Via HRW:

Research in 2012 found that the massive over-incarceration includes a growing number of elderly people whom prisons are ill-equipped to handle, and an estimated 93,000 youth under age 18 in adult jails and another 2,200 in adult prisons. Hundreds of children are subjected to solitary confinement. Racial and ethnic minorities remain disproportionately represented in the prison population.

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Advocates are concerned about Brennan's distressing record on civil liberties from his long career in intelligence under both the Bush and Obama administrations. CAIR, the country’s most prominent Muslim civil society group, and the ACLU, the civil liberties organization, have both already expressed concern about Brennan’s nomination.

But today, two liberal groups are turning up the pressure by mobilizing their members against the nominee. Calling Brennan the “assassination czar” of the Obama administration, CREDO, the increasingly active grassroots mobilizing group fueled by its cell phone business, and Demand Progress, a million-plus member civil rights organization, will begin mobilizing their members later this morning to urge the Senate to reject Brennan's confirmation as CIA director.

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Hagel has come under withering criticism for allegedly being hostile to Israel or even an “anti-Semite.” Much has already been written about this, but the evidence to support the attacks is exceedingly thin (he once used the phrase “Jewish Lobby” and has since apologized for it) and the charges are little more than a partisan smear job. But the fact that Republican senators have a real (if small) shot at killing the nomination of a fellow Republican senator over Israel shows how difficult it is to have any kind of serious discussion about Middle East policy. Hawkish Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham yesterday called Hagel “out of the mainstream” and “an in-your-face nomination of the president to all of us who are supportive of Israel.”

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Once again, Obama expressed his misgivings in a signing statement, but stressed that "the need to renew critical defense authorities and funding was too great" to reject the bill, which approved a $633 billion armed forces budget for the 2013 fiscal year. Also approved in the NDAA are controversial provisions that will likely make closing Guantánamo Bay detention center impossible in Obama's presidency, and provisions elsewhere in the act that allow for the indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens.

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As Reuters noted, however, "McMahon appeared reluctant to rule as she did, noting in her decision that disclosure could help the public understand the 'vast and seemingly ever-growing exercise in which we have been engaged for well over a decade, at great cost in lives, treasure, and (at least in the minds of some) personal liberty.'"

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