Copenhagen police kill suspect linked to two fatal attacks

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Prime minister describes first shooting at freedom of speech event as a terrorist attack

Bullet holes seen in the window and door of Krudttonden cafe after shots were fired during a discussion meeting about art, blasphemy and free speech in Copenhagen. One person was killed. Photograph: EPA

Forensic police officers work at the area around a cultural centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, where unidentified gunmen killed at least one person and wounded several police officers after opening fire. Photograph: Claus Bjorn Larsen/AFP/Getty Images

Police forensic specialists investigate at the scene of the first shooting in Copenhagen. Police said on Sunday the suspected gunman in two shooting attacks in the city had been shot dead. Photograph: EPA

Danish police shot and killed a man in Copenhagen on Sunday they believe was responsible for two deadly attacks at an event promoting freedom of speech and on a synagogue.

Denmarks spy chief Jens Madsen said the gunman was known to the intelligence services prior to the shooting and probably acted alone. He did not elaborate.

We cannot yet say anything concrete about the motive ... but are considering that he might have been inspired by the events in Paris some weeks ago, Mr Madsen told a news conference.

The prime minister described the first shooting, which bore similarities to an assault in Paris in January on the office of weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, as a terrorist attack.

Two civilians died in Saturdays attacks and five police were wounded. One man died in the first shooting, in a cafe hosting Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has been threatened with death for depicting the Prophet Mohammad in cartoons. Another died in an attack on a synagogue close by.

Islamist gunmen attacked a Jewish supermarket in Paris two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Danish police had launched a massive manhunt with helicopters roaring overhead and an array of armoured vehicles on the usually peaceful streets of

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Copenhagen police kill suspect linked to two fatal attacks

Copenhagen suspect known to police

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Prime minister describes first shooting at freedom of speech event as a terrorist attack

Bullet holes seen in the window and door of Krudttonden cafe after shots were fired during a discussion meeting about art, blasphemy and free speech in Copenhagen. One person was killed. Photograph: EPA

Forensic police officers work at the area around a cultural centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, where unidentified gunmen killed at least one person and wounded several police officers after opening fire. Photograph: Claus Bjorn Larsen/AFP/Getty Images

Police forensic specialists investigate at the scene of the first shooting in Copenhagen. Police said on Sunday the suspected gunman in two shooting attacks in the city had been shot dead. Photograph: EPA

Danish police shot and killed a man in Copenhagen on Sunday they believe was responsible for two deadly attacks at an event promoting freedom of speech and on a synagogue.

Denmarks spy chief Jens Madsen said the gunman was known to the intelligence services prior to the shooting and probably acted alone. He did not elaborate.

We cannot yet say anything concrete about the motive ... but are considering that he might have been inspired by the events in Paris some weeks ago, Mr Madsen told a news conference.

The prime minister described the first shooting, which bore similarities to an assault in Paris in January on the office of weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, as a terrorist attack.

Two civilians died in Saturdays attacks and five police were wounded. One man died in the first shooting, in a cafe hosting Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has been threatened with death for depicting the Prophet Mohammad in cartoons. Another died in an attack on a synagogue close by.

Islamist gunmen attacked a Jewish supermarket in Paris two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Danish police had launched a massive manhunt with helicopters roaring overhead and an array of armoured vehicles on the usually peaceful streets of

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Copenhagen suspect known to police

Copenhagen attacks an 'affront to freedom of speech': Tony Abbott

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Copenhagen attack an affront to one of our fundamental values: Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Photo: Andrew Meares

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has condemned a "brutal" shooting in Denmark as an affront to free speech, also flagging further efforts aimed at securing Australia's borders amid growing concerns about the threat of terrorism attacks on home soil.

Mr Abbott, in a statement issued on Sunday, said the thoughts of all Australians were with the Danish people.

"As with the Charlie Hebdo atrocity in Paris, the Copenhagen attack is an affront to one of our most fundamental values - freedom of speech," Mr Abbott said.

"We stand with the people and government of Denmark in confronting this cynical attempt to undermine that fundamental right."

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Earlier, the prime minister signalled security at Australia's borders would be ramped up.

Mr Abbott, who will deliver a national security statement on Monday week, said the rise of Daesh, or Islamic State, had seen new threats emerge, "where any extremist can grab a knife, a flag, a camera phone and a victim and carry out a terror attack".

Authorities on Friday confirmed police and a prayer hall were among targets uncovered by investigations into two alleged terrorists arrested in western Sydney last week.

A number of items were seized from the home of Omar Al-Kutobi, 24, and Mohammad Kiad, 25, allegedly including a machete, hunting knife and homemade Islamic State flag, as well as a video that allegedly shows one of the men vowing to launch an attack in the name of IS.

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Copenhagen attacks an 'affront to freedom of speech': Tony Abbott

Pantheism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Pantheism is the belief that the universe (or nature as the totality of everything) is identical with divinity,[1] or that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God.[2] Pantheists thus do not believe in a distinct personal or anthropomorphic god.[3] Some Asian religions are considered to be pantheistically inclined.

Pantheism was popularised in the West as both a theology and philosophy based on the work of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza,[4]:p.7 whose book Ethics was an answer to Descartes' famous dualist theory that the body and spirit are separate.[5] Spinoza held the monist view that the two are the same, and monism is a fundamental part of his philosophy. He was described as a "God-intoxicated man," and used the word God to describe the unity of all substance.[5] Although the term pantheism was not coined until after his death, Spinoza is regarded as its most celebrated advocate.[6]

Pantheism is derived from the Greek pan (meaning "all") and Theos (meaning "God"). There are a variety of definitions of pantheism. Some consider it a theological and philosophical position concerning God.[4]:p.8

As a religious position, some describe pantheism as the polar opposite of atheism.[5] From this standpoint, pantheism is the view that everything is part of an all-encompassing, immanent God.[2] All forms of reality may then be considered either modes of that Being, or identical with it.[7] Some hold that pantheism is a non-religious philosophical position. To them, pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical.[8]

The first known use of the term pantheism was in Latin, by the English mathematician Joseph Raphson in his work De spatio reali, published in 1697.[9] In De spatio reali, Raphson begins with a distinction between atheistic panhylists (from the Greek roots pan, "all", and hyle, "matter"), who believe everything is matter, and pantheists who believe in a certain universal substance, material as well as intelligent, that fashions all things that exist out of its own essence.[10][11] Raphson found the universe to be immeasurable in respect to a human's capacity of understanding, and believed that humans would never be able to comprehend it.[12]

The Catholic church regarded pantheistic ideas as heresy.[13]Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk who evangelized about an immanent and infinite God, was burned at the stake in 1600 by the Catholic Church. He has since become known as a celebrated pantheist and martyr of science.[14] Bruno influenced many later thinkers including Baruch Spinoza, whose Ethics, finished in 1675, was the major source from which pantheism spread.[15]

The term was first used in the English language by the Irish writer John Toland in his work of 1705 Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist. Toland was influenced by both Spinoza and Bruno, and used the terms 'pantheist' and 'Spinozist' interchangeably.[16] In 1720 he wrote the Pantheisticon: or The Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society in Latin, envisioning a pantheist society which believed, "all things in the world are one, and one is all in all things ... what is all in all things is God, eternal and immense, neither born nor ever to perish."[17][18] He clarified his idea of pantheism in a letter to Gottfried Leibniz in 1710 when he referred to "the pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe".[19][20][21]

Although the term "pantheism" did not exist before the 17th century, various pre-Christian religions and philosophies can be regarded as pantheistic. Pantheism is similar to the ancient Hindu philosophy of Advaita (non-dualism) to the extent that the 19th-century German Sanskritist Theodore Goldstcker remarked that Spinoza's thought was "... a western system of philosophy which occupies a foremost rank amongst the philosophies of all nations and ages, and which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the Vedanta, that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus."[22]

Others include some of the Presocratics, such as Heraclitus and Anaximander.[23] The Stoics were pantheists, beginning with Zeno of Citium and culminating in the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. During the pre-Christian Roman Empire, Stoicism was one of the three dominant schools of philosophy, along with Epicureanism and Neoplatonism.[24][25] The early Taoism of Lao Zi and Zhuangzi is also sometimes considered pantheistic.[21]

In 1785, a major controversy about Spinoza's philosophy between Friedrich Jacobi, a critic, and Moses Mendelssohn, a defender, known in German as the Pantheismus-Streit, helped to spread pantheism to many German thinkers in the late 18th and 19th centuries.[27]

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Pantheism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pantheism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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There are several different ways to think about pantheism. (1) Many of the world's religious traditions and spiritual writings are marked by pantheistic ideas and feelings. This is particularly so for example, in Hinduism of the Advaita Vedanta school, in some varieties of Kabbalistic Judaism, in Celtic spirituality, and in Sufi mysticism. (2) Another vital source of pantheistic ideas is to be found in literature, for example, in such writers as Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, and Robinson Jeffers. Although it should be added that, far from being limited to high culture, pantheistic themes are familiar, too, in popular media, for example in such films as Star Wars, Avatar, and The Lion King. (3) Thirdly, as it is in this article, pantheism may be considered philosophically; that is, a critical examination may be made of its central ideas with respect to their meaning, their coherence, and the case to be made for or against their acceptance.

A good way to understand any view is to appreciate the kind of drives that may push someone towards it. What arguments may be given for pantheism? Although there are a great many different individual lines of reasoning that might be offered, generally they may be placed under two heads; arguments from below, which start from a posteriori religious experience, and arguments from above, which start from a priori philosophical abstraction.

Following the first type of argument, pantheistic belief arises when the things of this world excite a particular sort of religious reaction in us. We feel, perhaps, a deep reverence for and sense of identity with the world in which we find ourselves. Epistemically it seems to us that God is not distant but can be encountered directly in what we experience around us. We see God in everything. The initial focus of attention here may be either our physical environment (the land on which we live, our natural environment) or else our social environment (our community, our tribe, our nation or, generally, the people we meet with) but further reflection may lead to its more universal expansion.

In the second kind of argument, reasoning starts from a relatively abstract concept whose application is taken as assured, but further reflection leads to the conclusion that its scope must be extended to include the whole of reality. Most typically, the concept in question is that of God, or perfect being, in which case pantheism appears as the logical terminus or completion of theism. The following paragraphs illustrate four examples of such reasoning.

(1) Traditional theism asserts the omnipresence of God and, while it strongly wishes to maintain that this is not equivalent to pantheism, the difference between saying that God is present everywhere in everything and saying that God is everything is far from easy to explain. If omnipresence means, not simply that God is cognisant of or active in all places, but literally that he exists everywhere, then it is hard to see how any finite being can be said to have existence external to God. Indeed, for Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke divine omnipresence was one and the same thing as space, which they understood as the sensorium of God. (Oakes 2006)

(2) The traditional theistic position that God's creation of the universe is continuous can easily be developed in pantheistic directions. The view that the world could not existeven for a secondwithout God, makes it wholly dependent on God and, hence, not really an autonomous entity. (Oakes 1983) Moreover, to further develop this argument, if God creates every temporal stage of every object in the universe, this undermines the causal power of individual things and leads to occasionalism, which in turn encourages pantheism; for in so far as independent agency is a clear mark of independent being, the occasionalist doctrine that all genuine agency is divinethat it all comes from a single placetends to undermine the distinction of things from God. Both Malebranche and Jonathan Edwards have found themselves charged with pantheism on these grounds, and it was for this reason that Leibniz, in attempting to refute the pantheistic monism of Spinoza, felt it most important to assert the autonomous agency of finite beings.

(3) Alternatively it might be argued that God's omniscience is indistinguishable from reality itself. For if there obtains a complete mapping between God's knowledge and the world that God knows, what basis can be found for distinguishing between them, there being not even the possibility of a mismatch? Moreover, were we to separate the two, since knowledge tracks reality we know something because it is the case and not vice versa then God would become problematically dependent upon the world. (Mander 2000)

(4) Arguments of this general type may also proceed from starting points more philosophical than theological. For example, Spinoza, the most famous of all modern pantheists starts from the necessary existence of something he calls substance. By this he means that which exists wholly in its own right, that whose existence does not depend upon anything else. The notion of the Absolute, or wholly unconditioned reality, as it figures in the philosophies of Schelling, Hegel, and the British Idealists may be considered a related development of the same philosophical starting point. In both cases the reasoning runs that this necessary being must be all-inclusive and, hence, divine.

The pantheist asserts an identity between God and nature, but it needs to be asked in just what sense we are to understand the term identity? To begin with it is necessary to raise two ambiguities in the logic of identity.

(1) Dialectical identity. It is important to note that many pantheists will not accept the classical logic of identity in which pairs are straightforwardly either identical or different. They may adopt rather the logic of relative identity, or identity-in-difference, by which it is possible to maintain that God and the cosmos are simultaneously both identical and different, or to put the matter in more theological language, that God is simultaneously both transcendent and immanent. For example, Eriugena holds that the universe may be subdivided into four categories: things which create but are not created, things which create and are created, things which are created but do not create, and things which neither create nor are created. He argues that all four reduce to God, and hence that God is in all things, i.e. that he subsists as their essence. For He alone by Himself truly has being, and He alone is everything which is truly said to be in things endowed with being (Periphyseon, 97). But nonetheless, for Eriugena, the uncreated retains its distinct status separate from the created, not least in that the former may be understood while the later transcends all understanding. In consequence, he insists that God is not the genus of which creatures are the species. Similarly, the Sufi philosopher, ibn Arabi identifies God and the universe, suggesting in a striking metaphor that the universe is the food of God and God the food of the universe; as deity swallows up the cosmos so the cosmos swallows up deity. (Bezels of Wisdom, 237; Husaini 1970, 180) But Ibn Arabi in no sense regards such claims as preventing him from insisting also on the fundamental gulf between the unknowable essence of God and his manifest being. We must distinguish between the nature of God and the nature of things, between that which exists by itself (God) and that which exist by another (the universe), but since the nature of God just is Being itself, no parallel distinction may be drawn between the being of God and the being of things. Nothing real exists besides God who discloses himself in and through the universe. (Chittick 1989, ch.5) Again, Nicholas of Cusa's celebrated doctrine of the coincidence of oppositeswhich he memorably illustrated by pointing to way in which, upon infinite expansion, a circle must coincide with a straight lineallows him to say both that God and the creation are the same thing and that there exists a fundamental distinction between the realm of absolute being and the realm of limited or contracted being. (Moran 1990) Even Spinoza goes to great lengths to show that the two attributes of thought and extension by which we pick out the one substance as God or nature are nonetheless at the same time irreducibly different. They may be co-referring but they are not synonymous; indeed, they are utterly incommensurable. Such a dialectical conception of unity, in which there can be no identity without difference, is a strong element in Hegel's thought, and also one aspect of what Hartshorne meant by dipolar theism; the opposites of immanence and transcendence are included among those which he thinks God brings together in his being.

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Pantheism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Transhumanist Declaration – Humanity+ | Elevating the …

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Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth. We believe that humanitys potential is still mostly unrealized. There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile enhanced human conditions. We recognize that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what we hold valuable. Some of these scenarios are drastic, others are subtle. Although all progress is change, not all change is progress. Research effort needs to be invested into understanding these prospects. We need to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications. We also need forums where people can constructively discuss what should be done, and a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented. Reduction of existential risks, and development of means for the preservation of life and health, the alleviation of grave suffering, and the improvement of human foresight and wisdom should be pursued as urgent priorities, and heavily funded. Policy making ought to be guided by responsible and inclusive moral vision, taking seriously both opportunities and risks, respecting autonomy and individual rights, and showing solidarity with and concern for the interests and dignity of all people around the globe. We must also consider our moral responsibilities towards generations that will exist in the future. We advocate the well-being of all sentience, including humans, non-human animals, and any future artificial intellects, modified life forms, or other intelligences to which technological and scientific advance may give rise. We favour allowing individuals wide personal choice over how they enable their lives. This includes use of techniques that may be developed to assist memory, concentration, and mental energy; life extension therapies; reproductive choice technologies; cryonics procedures; and many other possible human modification and enhancement technologies.

The Transhumanist Declaration was originally crafted in 1998 by an international group of authors: Doug Baily, Anders Sandberg, Gustavo Alves, Max More, Holger Wagner, Natasha Vita-More, Eugene Leitl, Bernie Staring, David Pearce, Bill Fantegrossi, den Otter, Ralf Fletcher, Kathryn Aegis, Tom Morrow, Alexander Chislenko, Lee Daniel Crocker, Darren Reynolds, Keith Elis, Thom Quinn, Mikhail Sverdlov, Arjen Kamphuis, Shane Spaulding, and Nick Bostrom. This Transhumanist Declaration has been modified over the years by several authors and organizations. It was adopted by the Humanity+ Board in March, 2009.

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Transhumanist Declaration - Humanity+ | Elevating the ...

Transhumanist Values – Nick Bostrom’s Home Page

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1. What is Transhumanism?

Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades.[1] It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology. Attention is given to both present technologies, like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

The enhancement options being discussed include radical extension of human health-span, eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and augmentation of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities. Other transhumanist themes include space colonization and the possibility of creating superintelligent machines, along with other potential developments that could profoundly alter the human condition. The ambit is not limited to gadgets and medicine, but encompasses also economic, social, institutional designs, cultural development, and psychological skills and techniques.

Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.

Some transhumanists take active steps to increase the probability that they personally will survive long enough to become posthuman, for example by choosing a healthy lifestyle or by making provisions for having themselves cryonically suspended in case of de-animation.[2] In contrast to many other ethical outlooks, which in practice often reflect a reactionary attitude to new technologies, the transhumanist view is guided by an evolving vision to take a more proactive approach to technology policy. This vision, in broad strokes, is to create the opportunity to live much longer and healthier lives, to enhance our memory and other intellectual faculties, to refine our emotional experiences and increase our subjective sense of well-being, and generally to achieve a greater degree of control over our own lives. This affirmation of human potential is offered as an alternative to customary injunctions against playing God, messing with nature, tampering with our human essence, or displaying punishable hubris.

Transhumanism does not entail technological optimism. While future technological capabilities carry immense potential for beneficial deployments, they also could be misused to cause enormous harm, ranging all the way to the extreme possibility of intelligent life becoming extinct. Other potential negative outcomes include widening social inequalities or a gradual erosion of the hard-to-quantify assets that we care deeply about but tend to neglect in our daily struggle for material gain, such as meaningful human relationships and ecological diversity. Such risks must be taken very seriously, as thoughtful transhumanists fully acknowledge.[3]

Transhumanism has roots in secular humanist thinking, yet is more radical in that it promotes not only traditional means of improving human nature, such as education and cultural refinement, but also direct application of medicine and technology to overcome some of our basic biological limits.

The range of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and activities accessible to human organisms presumably constitute only a tiny part of what is possible. There is no reason to think that the human mode of being is any more free of limitations imposed by our biological nature than are those of other animals. In much the same way as Chimpanzees lack the cognitive wherewithal to understand what it is like to be human the ambitions we humans have, our philosophies, the complexities of human society, or the subtleties of our relationships with one another, so we humans may lack the capacity to form a realistic intuitive understanding of what it would be like to be a radically enhanced human (a posthuman) and of the thoughts, concerns, aspirations, and social relations that such humans may have.

Our own current mode of being, therefore, spans but a minute subspace of what is possible or permitted by the physical constraints of the universe (see Figure 1). It is not farfetched to suppose that there are parts of this larger space that represent extremely valuable ways of living, relating, feeling, and thinking.

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Human Genetic Engineering – Popular Issues …

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Human Genetic Engineering - A Hot Issue! Human genetic engineering is a hot topic in the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government. Time will tell how committed the United States will be regarding the absolute ban on human cloning.

Human Genetic Engineering - Position of the U.S. Government Human genetic engineering has made its way to Capitol Hill. On July 31, 2001, the House of Representatives passed a bill which would ban human cloning, not only for reproduction, but for medical research purposes as well. The Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001, sponsored by Rep. Weldon (R-fL) and co-sponsored by over 100 Representatives, passed by a bipartisan vote of 265-to-162. The Act makes it unlawful to: "1) perform or attempt to perform human cloning, 2) participate in an attempt to perform cloning, or 3) ship or receive the product of human cloning for any purpose." The Act also imposes penalties of up to 10 years imprisonment and no less than $1,000,000 for breaking the law. The same bill, sponsored by Sen. Brownback (R-kS), is currently being debated in the Senate.

The White House also opposes "any and all attempts to clone a human being; [they] oppose the use of human somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning techniques either to assist human reproduction or to develop cell or tissue-based therapies."

Human Genetic Engineering - The Problems There are many arguments against human genetic engineering, including the established safety issues, the loss of identity and individuality, and human diversity. With therapeutic cloning, not only do the above issues apply, but you add all the moral and religious issues related to the willful killing of human embryos. Maybe the greatest concern of all is that man would become simply another man-made thing. As with any other man-made thing, the designer "stands above [its design], not as an equal but as a superior, transcending it by his will and creative prowess." The cloned child will be dehumanized. (See, Leon Kass, Preventing a Brave New World: Why we should ban human cloning now, New Republic Online, May 21, 2001.)

Human Genetic Engineering - A Final Thought Human genetic engineering leads to man usurping God as the almighty creator and designer of life. No longer will a child be considered a blessing from God, but rather, a product manufactured by a scientist. Man will be a created being of man. However, man was always intended to be a created being of God, in His absolute love, wisdom and glory.

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Interview with NSA / FBI Whistleblowers on encryption & surveillance (german subtitles) – Video

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Interview with NSA / FBI Whistleblowers on encryption surveillance (german subtitles)
On January 22nd, the Ceremony for the Sam Adams Award was held in Berlin. This year #39;s awardee William Binney gave us an interview, as well as the Whistleblow...

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Interview with NSA / FBI Whistleblowers on encryption & surveillance (german subtitles) - Video

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NSA shows off hypocritical Valentines Day tweets – NY …

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NSA shows off hypocritical Valentines Day tweets - NY ...

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NSA insists they are not listening to V-Day 'pillow talk'

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NSA/Handout/Reuters An undated aerial handout photo shows the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters building in Fort Meade, Maryland. The National Security Agency (NSA) was officially formed by President Harry S. Truman on Nov. 4. 1953.

PSST! The NSA is sharing its secrets not yours.

Yep, the intelligence agency that once punished its own staff for spying on their lovers insists, in tweets no less, that it doesnt listen to couples most intimate moments. On Saturday, the National Security Agency celebrated Valentines Day by (over)sharing.

#HappyValentinesDay from the #NSA. No, we dont listen to your pillow talk, the observant agencys tweeted.

The agency later took a musical spin on what they are up to.

Every move they make, every step they take. Well be watching our foreign adversaries, the agency tweeted Saturday, quoting The Polices 1983 hit, Every Breath You Take.

The NSA agency had previously unveiled a cache of top secret documents last year that stated an NSA intern tattled on his colleague for allegedly spying on his girlfriend.

The document dump revealed analysts had been spying on spouses and significant others for at least 10 years.

The agencys reports, released through a records request by the American Civil Liberties Union, revealed an employee spied on a spouses telephone records.

nhensley@nydailynews.com

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NSA insists they are not listening to V-Day 'pillow talk'

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Volokh Conspiracy: On Orin Kerr and the Constitution across borders

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As faithful readers of the VC know, Orin Kerr and I occasionally disagreeabout questions of Internet law, an area where our interests overlap considerably. But Orins recently-published paper on The Fourth Amendment and the Global Internet is a must-read - authoritative and comprehensive, a terrific resource for anyone thinking seriously aboutwhat Orin calls the clash between the territorial Fourth Amendment and the global Internet application of 4th Amednment doctrine to Internet communications, and the many difficulties of adapt[ing] to the reality of a global network in which suspects, victims, and evidence might be located anywhere. Legal scholarship at its best.

He covers a lot of ground, starting with the Supreme Courts decision inUnited States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, which held that a person must have sufficient voluntary connections to the United States either lawful presence in the United States at the time of the search or some substantial connection such as citizenship or lawful residency to enjoy the protection of the Fourth Amendmentat all. That is, some people in the world have FourthAmendment rights, and many others do not, which leads him to ask and analyze three questions: how should online contacts with the United States factor into whether aperson has Fourth Amendment rights? Second, how does the Fourth Amendmentapply when the government does not know if a target has sufficient contactsto establish Fourth Amendment rights? And third, how does the FourthAmendment apply when the government monitors communications betweenthose who lack Fourth Amendment rights and others who have those rights?

Next, he asks a series of questions assuming that the subject of monitoringhasFourth Amendment rights: how does the subjects location (or the location of the data) affect the analysis of whether the search was unreasonable within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment?

Its a rich mine of interesting and important law. But for me, the really interesting question is the one heexpressly) sets aside: is the Verdugo-Urquidez rule itself, and the strict territorial demarcations on which it is based, the right one for the 21st century Constitution? Orin takes the Verdugo rule as a given; as he notes, he accepts the basic principles of existing doctrine and considers how courts should apply those principles in light of the unprecedented globalism of todays Internet. Fair enough. But why dont we extend Fourth Amendment rights to foreigners outside of our borders? The Fourth Amendment, of course, only prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures why should the government be empowered to behave unreasonably towards anyone, with or without a citizenship or residency or locational connection to the United States? Why should the Constitution not prohibit US agents from searching the contents of Angela Merkels e-mail inbox?

Its a question that comes up frequently in Internet law, in connection with other constitutional rights. it was, for instance, very much central to the debates about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) a few years ago. The animating principle behind SOPA which targeted foreign infringing websites for elimination through the Domain Name System was one that was premised on the notion that the operators of foreign infringing websites have no due process rights that we have to recognize (because, like the 4th Amendment, the 5th Amendment due process guarantees have a territorial component), so we can summarily remove their websites from the global Internet without compunction, in a manner that would be unconstitutional if applied to US citizens. It struck me as a flawed view of the world then, and it does again in reading Orins article.

David G. Post is a Sr. Fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. He taught intellectual property/Internet law at Georgetown and Temple Universities, and is the author of In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace. Views expressed are his own and should not be attributed to his affiliated institutions.

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Volokh Conspiracy: On Orin Kerr and the Constitution across borders