Category:Civil Liberties

January 23, 2017 | Video

What happened to kids walking home from school alone? These days, more kids grow up with  “helicopter parents”. Joanna Williams at the University of Kent examines the decline of childhood freedom.

January 17, 2017 | Post

Westworld is first and foremost a depiction of the corrosive nature of total power — an illustration of Lord Acton’s quote that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” — as seen through the character of Dr. Robert Ford.

December 9, 2016 | Post

Do you have a right to die? The answer is not straightforward.

November 29, 2016 | Video

What was Edward Snowden’s impact on policy, and have the revelations that he exposed led to any real discussion or changes in the way that we do surveillance? An in depth discussion on all things Snowden with Julian Sanchez from the Cato Institute.

November 14, 2016 | Video

Even Hillary and Trump agreed that people on the Terror Watch List shouldn’t be able to buy a gun, but are they asking the right question? Adam Bates, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice believes that if people understood how individuals are added to these lists, they’d be more skeptical […]

November 9, 2016 | Post

Every day, AT&T adds four billion call records to Hemisphere, making it one of the largest known reservoirs of communications metadata that the government uses to spy on us.

November 5, 2016 | Post

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, which commemorates the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, where a group of Catholic dissidents, including Fawkes, planned to assassinate Protestant King James I and reinstate a Catholic head of state. In popular culture, however, Guy Fawkes Day and notably the Guy Fawkes mask have come to celebrate broader protest against the […]

October 31, 2016 | Post

Equality in slavery is not an admirable goal even among those with the best of intentions.

October 21, 2016 | Post

Imposing the values of secularism on “oppressed” Muslim women who wish to buy burkinis merely replaces one form of religious oppression with another.

October 12, 2016 | Post

The first amendment protects the rights of individuals to record the actions of government officials in public. US Customs and Border Protection disagrees.

October 4, 2016 | Post

There is no denying that protecting religious actors who are licensed by the state to provide medical services is one of the most complicated policy areas in which religious citizens have been accommodated.

September 23, 2016 | Post

This week brought us more than just the first day of Fall. Check out this week’s links below to get caught up. The city of Charlotte, North Carolina has declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew in response to protests in the wake of another black man fatally shot by police. This week’s […]

September 16, 2016 | Post

One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.

July 23, 2016 | Video

What if torturing foreigners abroad also meant the torture of American criminal suspects? Today, debates about the use of torture usually focus on the treatment of foreign terror suspects outside of the United States. Less talked about are the many well-documented instances of torture inflicted on US citizens in their own cities by their own […]

July 22, 2016 | Post

The recent protests in major cities nationwide against police violence have showcased the degree to which the lines between the police and military have been blurred. Weapons of war, including tanks, rifles, and paramilitary units, are increasingly being used by police on American streets. SWAT raids, once used only in high-intensity situations like bank robberies […]

July 22, 2016 | Post

At least from a libertarian perspective, the otherwise appealing ideological vision of Star Trek is compromised by its commitment to socialism.

July 22, 2016 | Post

The recent public fight between Apple and the FBI as well as the controversy over the Edward Snowden leaks make it seem as though government spying on American people is a recent phenomenon. In fact, government surveillance of U.S. citizens goes back over 100 years. Martin Luther King, for instance, was spied on extensively for […]

July 21, 2016 | Video

Watching footage of recent domestic protests, police are so armed to the teeth you’d think you were looking at a war zone. The sight of police officers riding in tanks, wearing combat gear, and using military-grade weapons to respond to civil unrest, has become increasingly common on American streets. Professor Abby Blanco of Tampa University […]

July 19, 2016 | Video

Is government surveillance of private citizens ever justified? Abby Hall Blanco from the University of Tampa explains the history of spying by the American government on its own and foreign citizens. How can lessons from the past inform our policies today?

July 18, 2016 | Post

The recent and ongoing protests in major American cities like Dallas, Phoenix, Baton Rouge, and St. Paul have brought disheartening images to our TVs. While we mourn the death of five police officers in Dallas, it is noteworthy that the assailant was killed by a robot manufactured by Northrup Grumman, a war manufacturer. Though the […]

June 12, 2016 | Post

Three years ago, Edward Snowden began leaking National Security Agency documents that detailed widespread and systemic U.S. government spying on American people. Among the surveillance programs Snowden revealed were “PRISM,” which mass collects the e-mail, voice, text, and video chats from tech companies, “XKeyscore,” which allows government analysts to search through massive databases of emails, […]

April 19, 2016 | Post

April 9, 2016 | Video

Is it possible to own another human’s individual rights? In the show ‘Game of Thrones’, armies of men were created to sacrifice their lives to their owners. How would you feel if your liberty and individual rights were taken away? What if you weren’t given the option in the first place?

April 1, 2016 | Post

April Fools! Learn Liberty is back in charge, and everything the Department of Careful Communications (DCC) said about censoring and redacting our content is moot. The DCC targeted us because it was worried that some of our communications might offend or misrepresent some people—or lead to confusion or disorder. Specifically, the DCC criticized: Our Speak […]