news brief: mid-May 2014

Last week there were a number of mainstream and public broadcasting stories around the NSA and their secret activities of  the last decade.

On Fresh Air, a 45 min piece with the producer of a Frontline documentary on the origins of mass surveillance program

The Frontline two hour documentary on the birth and gowth of the surveillance system

A 26 minute interview on Democracy Now! with Glenn Greenwald the journalist that broke the Edward Snowden story July 2013.

Another 44 minute interview on Fresh Air with Greenwald.

In other news, as lack of money for public defenders makes a lie out of the increasingly child-like pledge-of-allegiance coda 'with liberty and justice for all', ...
courts that are skewed toward paying customers, breeds culture where imprisoning those who cannot pay court fees and fines -while strictly illegal - becomes commonplace. NPR has a series of articles.

Floods in Balkans are the worst in over a century. http://t.co/jLz5XtzZ79 pic.twitter.com/h0Vfqm8EE3
— USA TODAY Weather (@usatodayweather) May 20, 2014

New economic book author Thoams Piketty talks - for ninety minutes - with nobel  laureates about problems of increasing economic inequality and ways to back away from that divide.