How Florida's "stand your ground" law enabled Zimmerman to escape conviction.

I support repeal of these "stand your ground" laws. This would reintroduce the "duty to retreat", so that shooting must be the last resort means for defending oneself, rather than the first priority.

However, it is clear that Zimmerman did not approach Martin in a friendly way, saying "Hi, what's up?" Zimmerman must have tried to threaten Martin in some way — something that gave Martin a motive to fight with him. Perhaps Zimmerman said, "What are you doing here?"

Thus I suggest another change in the law: to make it a crime to approach someone in a threatening way while carrying a weapon, or perhaps while carrying a concealed weapon, outside of certain special exceptions.

Cars can be deadly. We allow people to own and drive cars, but we require them to get training and pass a test, and we punish certain dangerous ways of using them (while drunk, racing on the street, etc). Why not do the same with guns? Carrying a gun could bring with it the special responsibility not to accost people and demand they explain themselves.

Punishing these actions even when they don't result in a death — and they usually don't — would teach most of the Zimmermans of the world to avoid the sort of conduct that led to this killing.

ALEC is pushing hard to privatize US public schooling.

A coalition led by the EFF has sued to put an end to massive government collection of Americans' phone call records.

The Free Software Foundation is one of the plaintiffs. Here's more information about the range of organizations.

Sad to say, even if this suit is successful, it won't go far enough to give us privacy rights. We must not allow a complete dossier about every American to be there, just waiting for the government to have some reason to investigate him.

Bills proposed to put an end to massive surveillance also do not go far enough to really solve the problem.

It's possible that Intel has given the NSA a back door into CPU chips.

In any case, upgradeable microcode that isn't free software means that these processors require nonfree installed software to run.

As Americans campaign against NSA surveillance, we should also limit surveillance of cars by license plate readers.

These systems can serve valid purposes, but they are unacceptable if they surveil everyone. They must be designed so that they don't really "see" a car unless its plate is on a list, and only a specific court order about a specific plate should put it on the list.