Edward Snowden’s disclosures, the New York Times reported on Sunday, “have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy.”

Agencies like the NSA and CIA -- and private contractors like Booz Allen -- can’t be sure that all employees will obey the rules without interference from their own idealism. This is a basic dilemma for the warfare/surveillance state, which must hire and retain a huge pool of young talent to service the digital innards of a growing Big Brother.

With private firms scrambling to recruit workers for top-secret government contracts, the current situation was foreshadowed by novelist John Hersey in his 1960 book The Child Buyer. When the vice president of a contractor named United Lymphomilloid, “in charge of materials procurement,” goes shopping for a very bright ten-year-old, he explains that “my duties have an extremely high national-defense rating.” And he adds: “When a commodity that you need falls in short supply, you have to get out and hustle. I buy brains.”

Today, grassroots leaders in Ohio called out state leaders for failing to protect Ohioans from solid radioactive waste from hydraulic fracturing (fracking). According to local citizens groups, Governor Kasich’s budget bill will provide inadequate protection from low-level radioactive waste, and therefore constitutes a handout to the oil and gas industry. They are asking the state to require the oil and gas industry to properly dispose of Low-Level Radioactive Waste (LLRW).

“The regulations represent yet another concession to the oil and gas industry at the expense of Ohioans’ health and safety,” says Alison Auciello, an organizer for Food & Water Watch. “Governor Kasich and our regulators are billing the proposal as a way to monitor and keep radioactive waste from landfills. But the legislation will indeed do the opposite of the claims made by the administration. Even worse, it gives a false sense of security that we are being protected. Disposal of radioactive waste should be considered a grave matter, not an ill-informed side note to the budget bill.”

The Guardian’s recent revelations concerning the intelligence community collecting cell phone call and location data from every single American, as well as the massive cataloging of social media interactions has jump-started a new national dialogue on privacy. This new social dialogue has not yet begun to include questions about the intelligence community speaking secretly rather than listening secretly. The public may be only just beginning to understand how the intelligence community can and does intervene anonymously in national politics.

Erin Niemela's recent proposal that we amend the Constitution to ban war is provocative and persuasive. Count me in. But I have a related idea that I think should be tried first.

While banning war is just what the world ordered, it has about it something of the whole Bush-Cheney ordeal during which we spent years trying to persuade Congress to ban torture. By no means do I want to be counted among those opposed to banning torture. But it is relevant, I want to suggest, that torture had already been banned. Torture had been banned by treaty and been made a felony, under two different statutes, before George W. Bush was made president. In fact, the pre-existing ban on torture was stronger and more comprehensive than any of the loophole-ridden efforts to re-criminalize it. Had the debate over "banning torture" been entirely replaced with a stronger demand to prosecute torture, we might be better off today.

We are in that same situation with regard to war. War was banned 84 years ago, making talk of banning war problematic.

After hearings on June 4, packed by angry, vocal opponents, the Manufacturing & Workforce Development Committee of the Ohio legislature, unanimously voted to table three so-called ‘right-to-work’ bills. Those bills had been introduced by right wing GOP legislators Ron Maag & Kristina Roegner a month earlier. Backed by the Tea Party, the bills were touted as the “Workplace Freedom Act,” but are actually designed to break up Union workplaces, after workers had voted to be represented by unions. Hundreds of workers rallied on statehouse grounds, protesting the proposed legislation, while the hearings were held.

“Ohioans have spoken, and did so overwhelmingly, on these ongoing attacks on working families and the middle class,” stated Ohio AFL-CIO President Tim Burga. “When corporate politicians gave us Senate Bill 5, to wipe out public worker’s bargaining in the state, the people overwhelmingly said NO! We wish these guys would get the message. We need jobs, health care, a decent, safe workplace & a good economy, not more of these divisive attacks on working families and the middle class!”