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Lawyers representing the
government’s intelligence services claim that PRISM, the mass
surveillance program that mines data from major Internet
communication companies, does not snoop on people based on
“keywords like terrorism” and instead targets certain email
addresses and phone numbers. Isn’t that heartening?

Agence-France Presse (AFP)
writes that “they told the hearing hosted by the Privacy and
Civil Liberties Oversight Board…that the NSA did not aim to scoop
up all web transmissions, but that the surveillance was narrowly
tailored to track or uncover terror suspects and other
threats.”

“We figure out what we want and we get that specifically, that’s
why it’s targeted collection rather than bulk collection,” a
representative of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence
said about the program, “which focuses on foreign suspects
outside the United States.”

“Any time there is not foreign intelligence value to collection,
by definition it will be purged,” the National Security Agency’s
Rajesh De stated.

Unsurprisingly, another NSA representative “insisted that the
American government and the NSA had acted within the law at all
times,”
according to The Register.

The claims are suspect, given the proclivity of NSA officials to
sometimes offer the “least untruthful” answer
when questioned. And even if PRISM does not itself pay attention to
keywords, that does not mean that one of the U.S. government’s 21
other
known mass surveillance projects, systems, and initiatives is
not providing PRISM with deeper information on its targets. The NSA
does, after all, employ “parallel
construction,” a tactic which Reuters
decribed last year: “federal agents are trained to
‘recreate’ the investigative trail to effectively cover up where
the information originated.”

The Guardian
reported an apparent bombshell—that “testimony by Rajesh
De contradicted denials by technology companies about their
knowledge of NSA data collection”—but the paper has
retracted that claim.

Edward Snowden spoke through a telepresence robot at a
conference on Tuesday,
assuring that “there are absolutely more revelations to come.”
Whether we’re moving closer toward a sci-fi utopia or dystopia, I
can’t tell, but the fact that a robo-Snowden has already been
unleashed seems like a good sign.

Some 56.9 percent of the cigarettes consumed in
New York state are smuggled in from another state. That’s a bigger
percentage than any other state, according to a
ranked map put together by analysts at the Tax Foundation. The
states with the next highest inbound smuggling are Arizona (51.5
percent), New Mexico (48.1 percent), Washington state (48 percent),
and Wisconsin (34.6 percent).

Cigarette smuggling is pervasive in large part because of the
high cigarette taxes some states impose. The sizable differentials
between higher-tax states and their lower-tax counterparts,
especially when those lower-tax states are nearby, creates a big
incentive to run cheap, low-tax smokes across borderlines.

So it’s not surprising to find that New York is not only the
state with the most inbound smuggling but the state with the
highest tax: $4.35 per pack—with an additional $1.50 tacked on if
you’re lucky enough to live in the Big Apple. According to the Tax
Foundation, both smuggling and cigarette taxes have risen rapidly
in New York during the last eight years. The rate of taxation is up
190 percent; smuggling has risen 59 percent over the same time
frame.

How does your state stack up in the cigarette smuggling
rankings? Check the Tax Foundation’s handy map to find out:

Higher cigarette taxes make legally purchased packs more
expensive. But they don’t always lead to the gush of new revenue
that legislators expect when those taxes are passed, in part
because of smuggling. When states count on that revenue (and spend
it) before it actually comes in, they
sometimes find themselves with budget holes as a result.

We’ve seen the same thing happen with the states involved in the
Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) with the big obacco
manufacturers: States basically partnered with cigarette makers in
exchange for a share of the revenue stream, which would then be
used to fund public health programs. But when the revenue
started to fall, states were left struggling to pay for the
programs they’d intended to fund with MSA money.  

On April 29 2007 @BarackObama, which is
currently run by Organizing for Action, tweeted its
first tweet:

@BarackObama is one of the most followed accounts on
Twitter, with 42.1 million followers at the time of writing.

The tweet came a few days after the Senate passed a funding bill
that would have set a date for American combat troop withdrawal
from Iraq. From a press
release about the bill from then-Sen. Obama:

I believe that my plan for a phased withdrawal with the goal of
removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31st, 2008 is still
the best way to pressure the warring factions to reach a political
settlement necessary to end this war. This similar plan responsibly
redeploys our troops from Iraq while protecting our interests in
the wider Middle East. It ensures that we are as careful getting
out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama made sure to
highlight the fact that—unlike another Democrat seeking the
presidency, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton—he was an early opponent of
the war in Iraq.

As Reason’s Ed Krayewski pointed out in September 2012,
President Obama
did not end the war. The agreement to withdraw American troops
from Iraq in December 2011 was negotiated between American and
Iraqi officials in 2008. In fact, Obama wanted American troops to
stay in Iraq after 2011. The troops left then anyway
because of that agreement signed by his predecessor—and so, as
The Huffington Post
explained, “the president ultimately had no choice but to stick
to candidate Obama’s plan.”

More from Reason on Iraq here.

On
last night’s episode of The
Independents, 18-year-old porn actress and Duke student

Belle Knox (NSFW) talked about her theories of maximal labor
value and personal autonomy:

Also,
Fox News funnyman and
rejected Reason intern Greg Gutfeld talked about John
McCain’s heroism, Rand Paul’s hair, and the Gut’s new book,

Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You:

Go to this
page for scores of more videos from the show. Tonight’s off,
though make sure you tune in the same time slot for Stossel.

In January 2013, Anne Jolis of The Wall
Street Journal interviewed Iron Maiden frontman Bruce
Dickinson about his side career as a businessman involved in
Britain’s “highly regulated” airline industry. That experience,

he explained, helped open his eyes to the risks of
overregulation. “Civil servants, on some level, are almost
institutionally prejudiced against entrepreneurial activity and
risk,” Dickinson declared.

Writing today at Wired.com, Alexander George brings word of
Dickinson’s latest entrepreneurial adventure, investing in the
“world’s biggest aircraft.”
Here’s the story:

It looks like a sketch from Howard Hughes’ notebooks, but this
massive air ship is real, and currently the biggest aircraft ever
produced. It can also be remote-controlled and land on water. And
the lead singer of Iron Maiden is an investor.

The HAV 304 “Airlander” is just over 300 feet long. That’s
nearly 60 feet longer than a Boeing 747, 80 feet longer than the
Spruce Goose, and 30 feet longer than the Antonov An-225, the
previous title-holder for the world’s largest aircraft.

The flying leviathan was produced by British aeronautics firm
Hybrid Air Vehicles, and it’s being considered for commercial and
rescue applications–at around $100 million each.