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And just so you know, while you are watching the first video, “Naked Citizens,” The I Files would never bareback with Big Brother.

“Naked Citizens,” ORF (Austrian Public Broadcasting)

There is one surveillance camera for every 14 people in London, giving it the dubious distinction of being the most monitored city in the world. In the wake of the images of the Boston Marathon bombers captured by fixed cameras, such video surveillance might be considered a social good. But as “Naked Citizens” asks, in the name of security, are we losing our most basic freedoms?

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The hackers carried out the attack using the popular spearphishing tactic. Via the New York Times:

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Raqqa, in eastern Syria, was overrun in late February by rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad. The rebels facilitated the New York-based group's access to facilities that had belonged to a government security agency and military intelligence in late April.

The HRW said its researchers found physical evidence that Syrians were tortured, including with a device which former detainees said was used to stretch or bend victims' arms and legs. The group also found documents indicating Raqqa residents were detained for legal actions like demonstrating or helping the injured.

Rights groups and opposition activists have long claimed that civilians have been detained arbitrarily, tortured, and sometimes have disappeared since the uprising against Assad's regime began. HRW's findings appear to be one of the largest finds of physical evidence bolstering those claims to date.

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Secretary of State John Kerry earlier this month took a step to revive diplomatic efforts – fruitless so far – to find a political solution to the crisis by announcing an international conference with Russia, now scheduled for early June in Geneva. At the same time, recent reports about the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria’s conflict sparked a renewed debate about whether the United States should directly intervene militarily there. The Obama administration has resisted calls to direct U.S. military action based on these reports, saying that it needed more evidence and that it was evaluating a wide range of policy options.

This cautious approach on U.S. military options for Syria is easy to criticize, but it is the best path in a range of bad options. The Obama administration wants to avoid actions that could inadvertently ignite and accelerate a wider regional conflict and produce greater threats for the United States and key partners in the region like Israel, Turkey, and Jordan. It also wants to keep the door open for diplomacy and a possible political deal to end the conflict.

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Rebels seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad are trying to carve a pathway from the Jordanian border through the southern province of Daraa, in what is seen as their best shot at capturing Damascus.

A few weeks ago, they scored significant gains, but have since suffered setbacks in a regime counteroffensive.

In recent days, regime troops and rebel fighters battled over Khirbet Ghazaleh, a town near the Damascus-Jordan highway.

Regime forces retook Khirbet Ghazaleh on Sunday and rebels withdrew from the area, said Rami Abdul-Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Troops reopened the highway, restoring the supply line between Damascus and the contested provincial capital of Daraa, he said. Regime forces were carrying out raids and searching homes in Khirbet Ghazaleh on Monday.

Damascus, still overwhelmingly under regime control, is the ultimate prize in a largely deadlocked civil war.

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With urgency in his voice, he refers to children being murdered and women being raped at the hands of the enemy.

“We really need you here. This is your opportunity for paradise.”

“Paradise” via the distinct possibility of death on a Syrian battlefield, he means.

The man is calling for recruits to join the Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate that makes up part of Syria’s fragmented armed opposition fighting the government forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

As unappealing as that “opportunity” may sound to the average European, the message has resonated with hundreds of youths here who have disappeared from their schools and homes and turned up in Syria.

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Inside Syria, the regime’s forces have started an ethnic cleansing campaign in the west intended to clear Sunnis from areas its Alawite supporters want to secure for themselves. The regime has also successfully pushed south toward the Jordanian border. In much of the rest of the country, there is lots of fighting but only marginal changes in the confrontation lines, which run through many urban areas, or between the urban centers and the countryside. Almost 7 million Syrians are now thought to need humanitarian assistance. The number could rise dramatically during the rest of the year.

Secretary Kerry’s visit to Moscow this week revived, once again, hopes for a negotiated settlement. He and the Russians agreed to try to convene a conference, even before the end of the month, that would include both the Syrian opposition and the Assad regime. The prospect of this conference will relieve President Obama of any need for a quick decision on unilateral action in Syria, since it would hardly be appropriate to preempt the conference. That is likely what both the Russians and the Americans wanted: more time.

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Syria isn’t Barack Obama’s Vietnam by a long shot. And I seriously doubt that Obama feels the same way Johnson did. But Johnson’s conundrum is in many ways Obama’s, too. In Syria, there are no good options, American credibility is at stake, and the pressures to act are considerable in the face of great uncertainties.

Doing nothing is unacceptable in the face of almost 80,000 dead and millions of Syrians displaced internally and abroad. Limited involvement – even on the military side -- will likely be ineffective, and getting stuck with the check through undertaking a massive military intervention is out of the question.

So what’s a guy to do? Sure, there are risks of acting; but there are consequences of not acting, too.

Indeed, in this regard, Syria is a moral tragedy and humanitarian disaster. It’s hemorrhaging refugees and radicalized jihadists. It’s a threat to regional stability and to Turkey, Jordan and Israel. It’s a potential proliferator of chemical weapons, a way to weaken Iran if only the Americans would recognize the opportunities; and it’s a threat to America’s credibility if Obama doesn’t act boldly in the face of self-declared “red lines.”

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Syria has hinted at possible retribution against Israel since the Jewish state carried out the airstrikes over the weekend, although official government statements have been relatively mild.

In that light, the Assad regime's decision to allow a minor Syria-based Palestinian group to prepare for attacks is largely seen as a face-saving gesture unlikely to escalate the confrontation with Israel.

"Syria has given the green light to set up missile batteries to directly attack Israeli targets," Anwar Raja of the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command told The Associated Press.

He said authorities also told the PFLP-GC that the group could carry out attacks independently without consulting Syrian authorities.

Israel's government has not formally confirmed involvement in the strikes on Syria. However, Israeli officials have said the attacks were meant to prevent advanced Iranian weapons from reaching Lebanon's Hezbollah militia, an ally of Syria and foe of Israel.

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U.S. and Russia meet in an attempt at framing a political solution:

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That's been McCain's line for years on big strategic questions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: defer to the military's advice and don't swerve. The military happened to agree with him then on the need to keep troops in those countries, but when it comes to Syria, where the Pentagon is at odds with McCain's gung-ho interventionism, McCain is suddenly uninterested in heeding the military's advice.

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White House spokesman Jay Carney says there is certainly evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria. And on Sunday, a member of a U.N. panel investigating events in Syria said there were indications that rebel forces had used the nerve agent sarin.

But Carney questioned that claim.

"We are highly skeptical of suggestions that the opposition could have or did use chemical weapons," he said. "We find it highly likely that any chemical weapon use that has taken place in Syria was done by the Assad regime. And that remains our position."

Carney's comments came as Syria remained one of the most high-profile issues confronting the administration. Air strikes over the weekend on alleged Hezbollah-bound weapons in Syria and the status of chemical weapons use kept the country's civil war at the forefront. Lebanon's Hezbollah militia is an ally of Syria and foe of Israel.

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The week before last, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, reading from a letter sent by the White House to Congress, announced that the Administration believes that the Syrian government recently used chemical weapons against its own people. If true, it would be a move which President Obama had previously described as a "red line" and a "game changer" in the Administration's policy on the two-year old civil war still raging in that country.

Hagel's statement was somewhat measured [emphasis added]: "Our intelligence community does assess, with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically, the chemical agent sarin."

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Chasing delusion and projection is easy. Dejection, not so much, especially when some of it seems to come from the president himself.

First the easy part: Obama is a real president, Michael Douglas wasn’t. LBJ had overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House and Senate; Obama’s party lost the House, and its Senate majority is meaningless because of the outrage of current filibuster rules. LBJ also dealt with reasonable Northeastern Republicans, who gave him overwhelming majorities for civil rights legislation when the Solid South began to secede from the Democratic Party largely over race. Obama, by contrast, has mainstream Republican leaders who are terrorized by their right flank and who declared their highest priority was blocking his reelection and his agenda; they failed at the first part but are doing a good job at the second.

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In the past months, rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad have frequently targeted military aircraft and air bases in an attempt to deprive his regime of a key weapon used to target opposition strongholds and reverse rebel gains in the 2-year-old conflict.

The fighting inside the Mannagh air base in northern Syria came a day after Israeli warplanes struck areas in and around the capital, Damascus, setting off a series of explosions as they targeted a shipment of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles believed to be bound for Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, officials and activists said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Monday posted a video online showing several armed men standing in front of the wreckage. One of the fighters in the footage says it's a helicopter that the rebels shot down late Sunday in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour, along Syria's border with Iraq.

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Syria and its patron Iran hinted at possible retribution, though the rhetoric in official statements appeared relatively muted.

Despite new concerns about a regional war, Israeli officials signaled they will keep trying to block what they see as an effort by Iran to send sophisticated weapons to Lebanon's Hezbollah militia ahead of a possible collapse of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

Israel has repeatedly threatened to intervene in the Syrian civil war to stop the transfer of what it calls "game-changing" weapons to Hezbollah, a Syrian-backed group that battled Israel to a stalemate during a monthlong war in 2006.

Since carrying out a lone airstrike in January that reportedly destroyed a shipment of anti-aircraft missiles headed to Hezbollah, Israel had largely stayed on the sidelines. That changed over the weekend with a pair of airstrikes, including an attack near a sprawling military complex close to the Syrian capital of Damascus early Sunday that set off a series of powerful explosions.

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Syria and its patron Iran hinted at possible retribution, though the rhetoric in official statements appeared relatively muted.

Despite new concerns about a regional war, Israeli officials signaled they will keep trying to block what they see as an effort by Iran to send sophisticated weapons to Lebanon's Hezbollah militia ahead of a possible collapse of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

Israel has repeatedly threatened to intervene in the Syrian civil war to stop the transfer of what it calls "game-changing" weapons to Hezbollah, a Syrian-backed group that battled Israel to a stalemate during a monthlong war in 2006.

Since carrying out a lone airstrike in January that reportedly destroyed a shipment of anti-aircraft missiles headed to Hezbollah, Israel had largely stayed on the sidelines. That changed over the weekend with a pair of airstrikes, including an attack near a sprawling military complex close to the Syrian capital of Damascus early Sunday that set off a series of powerful explosions.

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On NBC's "Meet the Press," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said that the U.S. may end up offering lethal weapons to Syrian rebels. He said: "The idea of getting weapons in, if we know the right people to get them, my guess is we'll give them to them." However, Leahy acknowledged the issue with that course of action, saying: "Our problem in who to supply is that some of these groups are strong Islamists, al-Qaida and others. And we've seen, like in Libya and Egypt and elsewhere, the Islamists tend to get the upper hand if they get in there."

On CBS's "Face the Nation," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said that the situation in Syria is "deteriorating by the day." "We're going to have to play for the best worst option at this point. That's the bad news, we've waited so long," Rogers said.

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