Did the ghosts of our slave-holding and Jim Crow past high-five each other in the Florida courtroom on Saturday? George Zimmerman was acquitted, but does that mean that American history was, too?

The experts who weighed in on the legal battle essentially noted that, in the absence of any witnesses other than Zimmerman, the prosecution couldn’t prove what had happened, or more to the point, couldn’t convincingly counter-argue his version of events – that he was returning to his car when Trayvon Martin assaulted him and threw him to the ground, forcing him to kill the boy in self-defense. Trayvon was dead; that left him, legally, voiceless and out of luck.

Hmm . . . wasn’t that the case anyway?

The incident blew into a national outrage because, initially, the boy’s killing was nothing at all in the eyes of the law. He was walking through a white, gated community, wearing a hoodie. Stand your ground! The police held the killer for a few hours, then let him go without charges.

It has been 30 days since Eric Holder called a secret meeting with a compliant press to get their input on when, and under what circumstances, they would like to be wiretapped by secret court order. A few days ago he released his new policy governing when the press could be wiretapped in order to prosecute reporters and their sources. The government-approved mainstream press uniformly thanked the Attorney General for only ignoring the Constitution a tiny little bit when it comes to them. They uniformly failed to note that the entire world is being bulk wiretapped, thus rendering said guidelines completely irrelevant. They also failed to note that the Attorney General has quietly appropriated the Right to define who and what the press is for the first time in history.

Trayvon Martin is dead, and his killer is walking free. The injustice of the situation is both palpable and maddening.
It is clear that had George Zimmerman not acted as an armed vigilante almost a year and a half ago, Trayvon Martin would still be alive.
It was Zimmerman who took it upon himself to determine that Trayvon Martin, a young African American, was "suspicious." Zimmerman then disregarded the instructions of a 911 dispatcher, first stalking and then initiating a confrontation with Trayvon Martin that left the unarmed youth dead.

But while a jury in Florida incomprehensibly decided not to hold Zimmerman responsible for this senseless murder, the federal government can still take action.

Tell the Attorney General Eric Holder to bring civil rights charges against George Zimmerman. Click here to automatically sign the petition.

It's hard not to conclude that Trayvon Martin was a victim of this senseless crime because of his race.

And whether intended or not, the message sent by Zimmerman's acquittal is that the value our culture places on a human life depends upon our skin color.

For more than a month, outrage has been profuse in response to news about NSA surveillance and other evidence that all three branches of the U.S. government are turning Uncle Sam into Big Brother.

Now what?

Continuing to expose and denounce the assaults on civil liberties is essential. So is supporting Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers -- past, present and future. But those vital efforts are far from sufficient.

For a moment, walk a mile in the iron-heeled shoes of the military-industrial-digital complex. Its leaders don’t like clarity about what they’re doing, and they certainly don’t like being exposed or denounced -- but right now the surveillance state is in no danger of losing what it needs to keep going: _power._

The huge digi-tech firms and the government have become mutual tools for gaining humungous profits and tightening political control. The partnerships are deeply enmeshed in military and surveillance realms, whether cruise missiles and drones or vast metadata records and capacities to squirrel away trillions of emails.