We have a problem when it comes to stopping mass surveillance.

The entity that’s conducting the most extreme and far-reaching surveillance against most of the world’s communications—the National Security Agency—is bound by United States law.

That’s good news for Americans. U.S. law and the Constitution protect American citizens and legal residents from warrantless surveillance. That means we have a very strong legal case to challenge mass surveillance conducted domestically or that sweeps in Americans’ communications.

Similarly, the United States Congress is elected by American voters. That means Congressional representatives are beholden to the American people for their jobs, so public pressure from constituents can help influence future laws that might check some of the NSA’s most egregious practices.

But what about everyone else? What about the 96% of the world’s population who are citizens of other countries, living outside U.S. borders. They don’t get a vote in Congress. And current American legal protections generally only protect citizens, legal residents, or those physically located within the United States. So what can EFF do to protect the billions of people outside the […]

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Richard Zuley, a Chicago police detective in 1990, talks to people at Argyle and Broadway while working a murder case. In 2003, he was on a special assignment as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay.
Credit: Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — When the Chicago detective Richard Zuley arrived at Guantánamo Bay late in 2002, US military commanders touted him as the hero they had been looking for.

Here was a Navy reserve lieutenant who had spent the last 25 years as a distinguished detective on the mean streets of Chicago, closing case after case – often due to his knack for getting confessions.

But while Zuley’s brutal interrogation techniques – prolonged shackling, family threats, demands on suspects to implicate themselves and others – would get supercharged at Guantánamo for the war […]

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Credit: Olimpia Zagnoli

In Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon,” a samurai has been murdered, but it’s not clear why or by whom. Various characters involved tell their versions of the events, but their accounts contradict one another. You can’t help wondering: Which story is true?

But the film also makes you consider a deeper question: Is there a true story, or is our belief in a definite, objective, observer-independent reality an illusion?

This very question, brought into sharper, scientific focus, has long been the subject of debate in quantum physics. Is there a fixed reality apart from our various observations of it? Or is reality nothing more than a kaleidoscope of infinite possibilities?

This month, a paper published online in the journal Nature Physics presents experimental research that supports the latter scenario — that there is a “Rashomon effect” not just in our descriptions of nature, but in nature itself.

Over the past hundred […]

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Mummified buddhist master Liuquan. Statue (L), CT scan (R).
Credit: Drents Museum

Using CT scanning technology and using an endoscope, researchers at Meander Medical Center in the Netherlands have been able to identify the body of a Buddhist monk encased inside of a 1,000-year-old Buddha statue, according to Colossal.

Officials from the Netherland’s Drents Museum — who are loaning the statue to the National Museum of Natural History in Budapest for an exhibition — delivered the statue to the medical center in an effort to learn more about the body they already knew was encased in the reliquary.

According to Erik Bruijn, an expert in the field of Buddhist art and culture and guest curator at the World Museum in Rotterdam, the body is that of a Buddhist master known as Liuquan, associated with the Chinese Meditation School

Using a specially designed endoscope, hospital surgeon Dr. Reinoud Vermeijden was able to extract samples from the thoracic and abdominal cavities of Liquan, inside […]

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Compared with other recreational drugs — including alcohol — marijuana may be even safer than previously thought. And researchers may be systematically underestimating risks associated with alcohol use.

Those are the top-line findings of recent research published in the journal Scientific Reports, a subsidiary of Nature. Researchers sought to quantify the risk of death associated with the use of a variety of commonly used substances. They found that at the level of individual use, alcohol was the deadliest substance, followed by heroin and cocaine.

And all the way at the bottom of the list? Weed — roughly 114 times less deadly than booze, according to the authors, who ran calculations that compared lethal doses of a given substance with the amount that a typical person uses. Marijuana is also the only drug studied that posed a low mortality risk to its users.

These findings reinforce drug-safety rankings developed 10 years ago under a slightly different methodology. So in that respect, the study is more of a reaffirmation of previous findings than anything else. But […]

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