Me and my metadata — thoughts on online surveillance.

Snowden describes how Germany cooperates with NSA spying on Internet traffic passing through Germany.

Hundreds of prisoners in Italy, sentenced to life in prison, asked to be executed instead.

The death sentence is an injustice, but anyone should have the right to die (and to ask for help in dying, in case they can't bring themselves to commit suicide). There is no reason to deny prisoners that right.

There is a valid concern that, if prisoners have the right to get help in dying, the prison may be set up so as to drive prisoners to want to die.

However, prisons can be set up that way in any case, and often are, in the US. A number of prisoners in Guantanamo have killed themselves — but it's not just there.

The UK government proposes to scrap the protections against torture that blocked its attempts to deport Abu Qatada. He returned to Jordan when UK negotiators obtained assurance he would get a fair trial there.

It seems to me that if the UK stopped promoting and facilitating torture, it might have more success in discouraging other countries from practicing torture, and then it would have an easier time deporting unwanted visitors, or even convincing them to leave, without trampling human rights.

The witch-hunt against people who watch "child pornography" may provide an excuse for US to start ordering people to decrypt their files.

Note that "child pornography" in the US includes images of people who are old enough that they can lawfully have sex in many states.