Two leading privacy rights organizations have put together a world map of surveillance societies, rating various nations for their civil liberties records. Both the U.S. and the UK are colored black for "endemic surveillance," as are Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Russia, China and Malaysia.

Steve Benen writes that "As it turns out, the reasoning behind the CIA's decision to record interrogations on video, stop recording interrogations on video, and destroy the interrogation videos was all exactly the same: officials were hoping to avoid a public-relations nightmare." They were unsuccessful, of course, since the media reported widely on the destruction of the tapes and

When former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on December 27, 2007, the only American TV networks to have full-time employees in Pakistan to call on were ABC and CNN. Other networks were forced to rely on stringers, freelance reporters on retainer with news agencies, until they could get their own reporters to Pakistan.