TYT - Battle over Snowden on CNN between Greenwald and Toobin

DN - Glenn Greenwald: U.S. Spying on Allies Shows "Institutional Obsession" With Surveillance

TYT - Glenn Greenwald To Head Massive New Media Venture

So Brave and Yet So Timid

Trey Smith

Last week the US Senate held another hearing about the NSA and their mass surveillance programs. While most of the Senators lobbed softball questions at NSA officials, according to Glenn Greenwald, two asked more substantive questions -- Democrats Ron Wyden and Mark Udall -- and these two have been sort of warning the American public about NSA excesses for some time.

Those two spent years publicly winking and hinting that the NSA under President Obama was engaged in all sorts of radical and abusive domestic surveillance (although - despite the absolute immunity protection they enjoy as Senators under the Constitution - they took no action, and instead waited for Edward Snowden (who had no such immunity) to bravely step up and reveal to the American people specifically what these two Senators kept hinting at).

In a manner of speaking, these two Senators have acted so brave and yet so timid at the same time.

In terms of the elite Washington power brokers, they have been courageous. Though both have been encouraged by their colleagues and the President himself to keep their mouths shut, they have steadfastly drawn attention to the fact that what NSA officials and members of the Obama administration say is not altogether accurate. Basically, they have pointed out repeatedly that a lot of lies have been told without necessarily calling them lies.

But while one could characterize them as being brave in a limited sense, they concurrently have been chickenshit cowards! Though they have known the truth from the lies, they have hidden themselves behind the idea that they aren't allowed to discuss classified information in public. As Greenwald makes abundantly clear, this assertion simply isn't true! The US Constitution grants them virtual immunity for anything they say -- at the very least -- on the floor of the US Senate.

In others words, rather than hinting at improprieties, both have had numerous opportunities to spill the beans. They have had numerous opportunities to bring the truth to light. Despite these repeated opportunities, they each chose to duck for cover.

So, it is hard to pat them on the back for being cowardly heroes of democracy and transparency.

Be Careful What You Publicly (or Privately) Say

Trey Smith

A well-known and highly respected Yemeni anti-drone activist was detained yesterday by UK officials under that country's "anti-terrorism" law at Gatwick Airport, where he had traveled to speak at an event. Baraa Shiban, the project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve, was held for an hour and a half and repeatedly questioned about his anti-drone work and political views regarding human rights abuses in Yemen.

When he objected that his political views had no relevance to security concerns, UK law enforcement officials threatened to detain him for the full nine hours allowed by the Terrorism Act of 2000, the same statute that was abused by UK officials last month to detain my partner, David Miranda, for nine hours.

Shiban tells his story today, here, in the Guardian, and recounts how the UK official told him "he had detained me not merely because I was from Yemen, but also because of Reprieve's work investigating and criticising the efficacy of US drone strikes in my country."

The notion that Shiban posed some sort of security threat was absurd on its face. As the Guardian reported Tuesday, "he visited the UK without incident earlier this summer and testified in May to a US congressional hearing on the impact of the covert drone programme in Yemen."

Viewing anti-drone activism as indicative of a terrorism threat is noxious. As Reprieve's Cory Crider put it yesterday, "if there were any doubt the UK was abusing its counter-terrorism powers to silence critics, this ends it."
~ from UK Detention of Reprieve Activist Consistent with NSA's View of Drone Opponents as "Threats" and "Adversaries" by Glenn Greenwald ~

If you are Muslim and you hold views that are counter to the US/UK, you better keep such views to yourself! That's the message of this detention and others cited by Greenwald. In fact, when it comes to an opposition to the use of drones, you don't even have to be a Muslim! You represent a "threat," nonetheless.

If anyone STILL thinks that this mass surveillance apparatus is focused strictly on anti-terrorism, your head must be so far up your arse that you will never be able to extricate it. In recent months, it has been revealed that the NSA (and GCHQ) regularly spies on journalists, the UN, long-time allies, state-run corporations (i.e., Brazil's chief oil company), leaders of sovereign nations (e.g., Brazil and Mexico), and just about everyone else. Unless we all are considered potential terrorists, it is more than obvious that this ubiquitous spying isn't tied to terrorism at all.

Conservatives have long been concerned with a nonexistent blueprint of the UN to create a world government. The fear is that such a world government would deprive red-blooded Americans of the freedoms (i.e., the right to own as many guns as humanly possible) they hold dear. To counter this fear, such conservatives have been ardent supporters of the military-intelligence-industrial complex.

It is more than ironic that the very institution these folks cherish is the one that is trying to create a quasi world government in secret. When you know what everyone else is up to, it makes it that much easier to control and/or manipulate them. You don't have to declare yourselves as a de facto world government, but it leads to much the same result. You get to call the shots and anyone who opposes you is quickly threatened, bribed, blackmailed, detained, imprisoned, tortured or dispatched with by one means or another.

How To Skirt the Law

Trey Smith

The revelations about the NSA keep coming! On Wednesday, Glenn Greenwald and his colleagues revealed that the NSA "shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens." We had previously learned that the top intelligence agencies of the five Eyes (US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) routinely do the same thing.

On its face, this news is not all that surprising. One would think that allied spy agencies would share some information. But as Greenwald, Cenk Uygur and others have pointed out, there is a much more nefarious reason for the massive amounts of information that change hands: It provides a mechanism for each nation's spies to get around their own nation's laws!

If nation A has a certain prohibition in place, then all they have to do is to turn over the raw data to one of their partners. The outside nation does the dirty work and then shares their findings with nation A. The leader of Nation A can then say, "We aren't looking into this sort of stuff" and, while this statement technically is true, they are receiving and making use of the data nonetheless. It's a wink, wink sort of strategy.

Another import aspect of this latest revelation serves to underscore the two-tiered justice system in America. The federal government can skirt laws with impunity and nothing happens. Multinational corporations can do it too (e.g., setting up an off-shore tax haven to get around paying US taxes) and get away with it virtually unscathed. But not so for average citizens. If we run afoul of the law, we tend to pay for it in spades!

A few years back, there were organized trips to Canada to procure legal drugs for a variety of health issues. As it turned out, you can buy prescribed medicines in Canada for a fraction of the over-bloated prices charged in the US. But the feds put a stop to this by threatening or actually arresting people. We can't have average citizens skirting our laws! No, that's reserved for the government itself or its corporate benefactors!

DN - Glenn Greenwald On Secret NSA Program to Crack Online Encryption

Nothing Is Scared Anymore...Except Unmitigated Power

Trey Smith

On Wednesday, I noted how the Syrian "situation" had scrubbed the troubling issues surrounding the NSA programs from the headlines. I mentioned that I believe that one reason President Obama appears in no rush to ask that Congress be reconvened earlier than scheduled to vote on the measure authorizing the US to bomb Syria is the administration's hope that the controversy surrounding Syria will keep spygate off the front pages. I also stated that there was one bug in the ointment: Glenn Greenwald.

Well, that bug -- along with fellow reporters at The Guardian, ProPublica and the New York Times -- have raised their heads to present us with new revelations.

US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.

The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".

Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with "brute force", and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves.

Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software.

The files, from both the NSA and GCHQ, were obtained by the Guardian, and the details are being published today in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica. They reveal:

• A 10-year NSA program against encryption technologies made a breakthrough in 2010 which made "vast amounts" of data collected through internet cable taps newly "exploitable".

• The NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to "covertly influence" their product designs.

• The secrecy of their capabilities against encryption is closely guarded, with analysts warned: "Do not ask about or speculate on sources or methods."

• The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace".

• A GCHQ team has been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on the "big four" service providers, named as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

Supposedly, all these programs are needed to combat a small number of current or potential terrorists. As I mentioned in a post this morning, we are regularly told that we have severely wounded al-Qaeda and its associate forces. Many reports suggest that their numbers continue to shrink and that their operational structure is in disarray. If all these things are true, why is it that we must compromise the rights of world citizens to rein in this ragtag band of murderous militants?

Why is it so damn important for the US and British intelligence services to have access to yours and my bank records? Medical records? Online purchases? Material checked out from the local library? Routine communications?

By itself, this rampant overkill suggests that terrorism is NOT the real target. No, it suggests that the real target is absolute control of the vast majority of the world's population. It suggests that nothing is sacred (or private) anymore...except unmitigated power. It suggests that almost everything the powers that be think and do is not for anyone else to know and what the rest of us think and do is no longer private.

If you don't believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely, how do you explain these massive surveillance programs that lump the guilty and innocent together in one all-encompassing net?

BO Must Read This Blog!

Trey Smith

Back on Friday, I asked if Barack Obama was going to follow Britain's lead by allowing Congress to vote on whether or not the US should attack Syria. Up until that point, all signs pointed toward the President making a unilateral decision without any Congressional input. But just when it seemed like Obama was going to push the proverbial button, he blinked and said he would allow Congress to weigh in on the matter. To say the least, it is something of a perplexing about-face.

Dave Lindorff writes that overall opposition by the American public -- not simply my blog post on the matter -- caused Obama to have second thoughts.

Behind these flowery words is a hard reality: the president of the United States has been compelled to back down. Public opposition in the US and abroad to yet another war of choice launched against another middle eastern nation that poses no threat to this country has brought the American war machine, at least for the moment, to a screeching halt. In Europe and elsewhere, public pressure has forced leaders to back away from their initial reflexive support for a US strike on Syria. And according to Charles Blow of the New York Times, 50% of Americans oppose any US military action against Syria, with only 28% saying that an attack on Syria would be in America’s interest. Blow says this is the highest level of public opposition to war in three decades of US warmaking.

It is a time for celebrating the power of the people, but it is not a time for resting. The lobbying of members of Congress by the administration and the various interests that are pushing for war will be intense over the coming week or so. Public pressure on members of Congress to oppose any attack will have to be even more relentless and intense.

This madness can be stopped. We can see that now. But it can only be stopped if we keep the pressure on every member of Congress.

As much as I would like to pat ourselves on the back, I am still left with the question: Why did public opinion impact this singular issue?

Back during the health care debate, overwhelming majorities favored some type of universal health care and yet Obama pulled the plug on the watered down Public Option. Large numbers of Americans opposed almost all of the corporate bailouts as well as the "settlement" with mortgage financiers in regards to the illegal foreclosure of homes. In these cases, widespread public opposition didn't register at all with the president and his advisers.

So, why did public opposition -- an opposition that did not include massive protests and demonstrations -- supposedly turn the tide in this case?

Not unexpectedly, the astute Glenn Greenwald provides the answer.

It's a potent sign of how low the American political bar is set that gratitude is expressed because a US president says he will ask Congress to vote before he starts bombing another country that is not attacking or threatening the US. That the US will not become involved in foreign wars of choice without the consent of the American people through their representatives Congress is a central mandate of the US Constitution, not some enlightened, progressive innovation of the 21st century. George Bush, of course, sought Congressional approval for the war in Iraq (though he did so only once it was clear that Congress would grant it: I vividly remember watching then-Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joe Biden practically begging the Bush White House to "allow" Congress to vote on the attack while promising in advance that they would approve for it).

But what makes the celebratory reaction to yesterday's announcement particularly odd is that the Congressional vote which Obama said he would seek appears, in his mind, to have no binding force at all. There is no reason to believe that a Congressional rejection of the war's authorization would constrain Obama in any way, other than perhaps politically. To the contrary, there is substantial evidence for the proposition that the White House sees the vote as purely advisory, i.e., meaningless.

Recall how - in one of most overlooked bad acts of the Obama administration - the House of Representatives actually voted, overwhelmingly, against authorizing the US war in Libya, and yet Obama simply ignored the vote and proceeded to prosecute the war anyway (just as Clinton did when the House rejected the authorization he wanted to bomb Kosovo, though, at least there, Congress later voted to allocate funds for the bombing campaign). Why would the White House view the President's power to wage war in Libya as unconstrainable by Congress, yet view his power to wage war in Syria as dependent upon Congressional authorization?

More to the point, his aides are making clear that Obama does not view the vote as binding, as Time reports:

To make matters more complicated, Obama's aides made clear that the President's search for affirmation from Congress would not be binding. He might still attack Syria even if Congress issues a rejection.

It's certainly preferable to have the president seek Congressional approval than not seek it before involving the US in yet another Middle East war of choice, but that's only true if the vote is deemed to be something more than an empty, symbolic ritual. To declare ahead of time that the debate the President has invited and the Congressional vote he sought are nothing more than non-binding gestures - they will matter only if the outcome is what the President wants it to be - is to display a fairly strong contempt for both democracy and the Constitution.

TYT - Glenn Greenwald Fires Back After Partner Detained At Heathrow

Follow-Up to Glenn Greenwald's Partner Held in Detention

Trey Smith

Upon learning that his partner had been detained at Heathrow Airport for 9 long hours, Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Guardian, in part,

According to a document published by the UK government about Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, "fewer than 3 people in every 10,000 are examined as they pass through UK borders" (David was not entering the UK but only transiting through to Rio). Moreover, "most examinations, over 97%, last under an hour." An appendix to that document states that only .06% of all people detained are kept for more than 6 hours.

The stated purpose of this law, as the name suggests, is to question people about terrorism. The detention power, claims the UK government, is used "to determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism."

But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

Worse, they kept David detained right up until the last minute: for the full 9 hours, something they very rarely do. Only at the last minute did they finally release him. We spent all day - as every hour passed - worried that he would be arrested and charged under a terrorism statute. This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

The fact that this unlawful detention is so brazen basically tells us that the US and UK really don't care what anybody thinks. They have granted themselves this power and they will use it whenever it fits into someone's political agenda.

If nothing else, it only underscores the amount of guts journalists like Greenwald and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden are exhibiting. While Bradley Manning's acts were courageous too, he did them anonymously. Who can blame him? But Snowden, Greenwald, other Guardian reporters and a few from The Washington Post are standing up in the open to shine a spotlight on areas the US and British governments desperately want to keep in the dark.

Talk about speaking truth to power!!

And So It Begins

Trey Smith

If this blog had a far larger footprint -- tens or hundreds of thousands of page views per day, week or month -- I might be a bit nervous. For the last two months, I've been sharing articles and offering commentary on the NSA scandal. Even before that, I have been a steadfast critic of the last two presidential administrations as well as Corporate America. In today's world, the political and economic elite don't take kindly to criticism. Criticize too often or too loudly and you become their target!

Since Glenn Greenwald has written one expose after another, he must know that he definitely is in their crosshairs. I am betting that he is extra cautious these days because he can never be sure if America or the UK might try to take him out, grab him or employ some type of intimidation or harassment.

Well, the UK government -- at the behest of the US, I'm sure -- has made their first move. His partner, David Miranda, was detained at London's airport for 9 hours without charges and had all of his electronic devices confiscated.

Here is what Greenwald had to say on the matter.

"This is a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process," said Greenwald. "To detain my partner for a full nine hours while denying him a lawyer, and then seize large amounts of his possessions, is clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and GCHQ. The actions of the UK pose a serious threat to journalists everywhere.

"But the last thing it will do is intimidate or deter us in any way from doing our job as journalists. Quite the contrary: it will only embolden us more to continue to report aggressively."

Just like the US Patriot Act, the UK has granted itself overly broad police powers. Miranda was held under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. According to The Guardian,

Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act has been widely criticised for giving police broad powers under the guise of anti-terror legislation to stop and search individuals without prior authorisation or reasonable suspicion – setting it apart from other police powers. Those stopped have no automatic right to legal advice and it is a criminal offense to refuse to cooperate with questioning under schedule 7, which critics say is a curtailment of the right to silence.

Miranda had gone to Berlin to visit Laura Poitras, a US filmmaker, who has been working with Greenwald and others on the Snowden leaks. It is more than obvious that neither the US nor British governments believe that Miranda has ties to terrorism --he simply happens to be the partner of the man who has been making both governments look bad.

It doesn't say anything positive to think that, in today's world, a democratic government can hassle innocent people simply for doing their jobs. In Greenwald's case, he happens to be an investigative journalist who has courageously been investigating the governments responsible for having Miranda picked up...FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN TO TRY TO SILENCE GREENWALD!!

Obama Suddenly Wants More NSA Oversight?

Trey Smith

You may have heard that on Friday President Obama did a sudden about-face and is now saying his administration is interested in formulating better controls for our nation's vast surveillance programs. I think the reasons for his dramatic change of heart are twofold: 1) The Snowden revelations are causing his administration to lose a lot of political capital and 2) He has just figured out that there is a decidedly negative financial aspect to this whole situation.

It is always fun to watch a politician, who is dead set against something, turn around to say they've really been for it all along! For weeks, Obama has resisted any suggestions of changes in the laws and regulations regarding our various intelligence agencies. He has told the world over and over again that he was confident in the [supposed] safeguards already in place.

But a majority of Americans and a growing number of senators and representatives in Congress haven't bought into his rhetoric. Since Snowden's first revelations, the president's approval numbers have headed south. Realizing that this issue could well tarnish his presidential legacy, Obama has come to the realization that he needs to get out ahead of the controversy. So, the time-honored strategy is to promote a slew of meaningless changes that, in truth, won't change much of anything!

You see, Obama doesn't really want more oversight; what he wants is the perception that he's working to provide more oversight. In politics, perception is far more important than truth!

The other aspect -- a potential economic hit -- is one that the ever intrepid Glenn Greenwald has pointed out.

The growing (and accurate) perception that most US-based companies are not to be trusted with the privacy of electronic communications poses a real threat to those companies' financial interests. A report issued this week by the Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that the US cloud computing industry, by itself, could lose between $21 billion to $35 billion due to reporting about the industry's ties to the NSA. It also notes that other nations' officials have been issuing the same kind of warnings to their citizens about US-based companies as the one issued by Lavabit yesterday:

And after the recent PRISM leaks, German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich declared publicly, 'whoever fears their communication is being intercepted in any way should use services that don't go through American servers.' Similarly, Jörg-Uwe Hahn, a German Justice Minister, called for a boycott of US companies."

The US-based internet industry knows that the recent transparency brought to the NSA is a threat to their business interests. This week, several leading Silicon Valley and telecom executives met with President Obama to discuss their "surveillance partnership". But the meeting was - naturally - held in total secrecy. Why shouldn't the agreements and collaborations between these companies and the NSA for access to customer communications not be open and public?

Obviously, the Obama administration, telecom giants, and the internet industry are not going to be moved by appeals to transparency, privacy and basic accountability. But perhaps they'll consider the damage being done to the industry's global reputation and business interests by constructing a ubiquitous spying system with the NSA and doing it all in secret.

The very thought that some of his corporate benefactors may lose even a smidgen of market share -- profits -- must have the Obama administration scrambling to staunch the wound! The evisceration of the constitutional rights of the American (and world) populace is of no great concern, but we can't have Wall Street giants take a financial hit because of this ordeal!

More Of What We Had Already Surmised

Trey Smith

Members of Congress have been repeatedly thwarted when attempting to learn basic information about the National Security Agency (NSA) and the secret FISA court which authorizes its activities, documents provided by two House members demonstrate.

From the beginning of the NSA controversy, the agency's defenders have insisted that Congress is aware of the disclosed programs and exercises robust supervision over them. "These programs are subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate," President Obama said the day after the first story on NSA bulk collection of phone records was published in this space. "And if there are members of Congress who feel differently, then they should speak up."

But members of Congress, including those in Obama's party, have flatly denied knowing about them. On MSNBC on Wednesday night, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Ct) was asked by host Chris Hayes: "How much are you learning about what the government that you are charged with overseeing and holding accountable is doing from the newspaper and how much of this do you know?" The Senator's reply:

The revelations about the magnitude, the scope and scale of these surveillances, the metadata and the invasive actions surveillance of social media Web sites were indeed revelations to me.

But it is not merely that members of Congress are unaware of the very existence of these programs, let alone their capabilities. Beyond that, members who seek out basic information - including about NSA programs they are required to vote on and FISA court (FISC) rulings on the legality of those programs - find that they are unable to obtain it.
~ from Members of Congress Denied Access to Basic Information about NSA by Glenn Greenwald ~

This is the thing about secret dealings or operations: Few people are "in the know"! The larger the group of individuals with inside information, the greater the possibility that someone will say something to someone else that they aren't supposed to say. So, to guard against these types of disclosures, only the very few are in the loop.

Of course, in a representative government, this creates a serious problem. Our representatives are asked to vote on legislation about these secret operations with very little knowledge of what they entail. As Greenwald makes clear, it is next too impossible to make an informed decision when the representative him/herself is woefully uninformed. The situation is even worse when the representative tries to become better informed, but is continually rebuffed.

So, this is where we stand today. The NSA is conducting massive surveillance of Americans that violates the US Constitution and even some of the liberal laws that pertain to spying. The special court that oversees these intelligence programs is little more than a rubber stamp. The vast majority of Congress is kept out of the loop which means they can't provide even minimal oversight.

In essence, we could say that the Executive Branch is operating like the mafia and its henchman are the few members of Congress -- the small minority "in the know" -- who receive huge financial contributions from the military-intelligence-industrial complex. To top it all off, most of the actual spying is being done by Wall Street corporations who are rolling in billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars.

Splendid. Absolutely splendid!

We Can Talk Until the Cows Come Home

Trey Smith

Stepping outside my ongoing miniseries, 2013/1984, I want to draw your attention to the underlying message of the Obama administration in terms of discussion about the NSA's [illegal] mass surveillance programs. On more than one occasion in the past two months, the President has said he welcomes a debate about the key issues. However, he has shown that this declaration comes with a caveat -- Congress can talk about the situation all it wants so long as they don't try to change it! Attempting to change it in any way, shape or form is going too far!

In essence, he is advocating a position of talk without action. This is interesting because, in most instances, the President has complained of this very thing himself. He has derided Congress -- rightfully so -- for talking about the unemployment problem, but being unwilling or unable to pass any kind of meaningful legislation that addresses the problem. (Of course, the Obama administration itself hasn't done much to address the problem either.) He has castigated the Republican leadership in the House for an impenetrable gridlock and yet he relied on those same leaders to block the Awash Amendment.

As Glenn Greenwald noted in the column I quoted from in my previous post,

One of the worst myths Democratic partisans love to tell themselves - and everyone else - is that the GOP refuses to support President Obama no matter what he does. Like its close cousin - the massively deceitful inside-DC grievance that the two parties refuse to cooperate on anything - it's hard to overstate how false this Democratic myth is. When it comes to foreign policy, war, assassinations, drones, surveillance, secrecy, and civil liberties, President Obama's most stalwart, enthusiastic defenders are often found among the most radical precincts of the Republican Party.

And so, after saying he welcomes a debate on mass surveillance, Obama did everything possible to shut it down in the US House when it appeared that it might constrain one specific program aimed at upholding the constitutional rights of the American people. Yes, talk all you like, he says, just don't try to constrain my administration in any way!

2013/1984, Part 6

Trey Smith

Now we come to the Ministry of Love which dovetails nicely with the current NSA spygate.  In Orwell's Oceania, this ministry is responsible for spying on its own citizens and dispensing torture upon anyone who doesn't show the utmost love and respect for Big Brother.  It reminds one of the Third Reich and how those who didn't show sufficient dedication to the Führer were imprisoned, systematically reprogrammed (tortured) or executed.

For the most part -- though someone like Bradley Manning might argue otherwise -- we aren't that far down this road, but we certainly are laying the bricks today to get there.  

On Wednesday, in the US House of Representatives, a vote was taken to prohibit the NSA from collecting metadata from millions of Americans without probable cause and for specific investigation.  Former constitutional scholar [President] Barack Obama implored representatives to turn a blind eye to the US Bill of Rights and to vote the measure down.  Big Brother should not be constrained!

He got his wish!  Though the vote was very close, he twisted enough arms to insure that the measure was defeated.  Now, with the blessing of the majority in the House of Representatives, his administration can get back to the job of unfettered spying on everyone.

Just like in Oceania, the President has made it crystal clear that he doesn't trust the people he serves.  Utilizing the strategy of fear of nebulous bogeymen, we are being told that our constitutional rights must be thrown to the side of the road in order to protect them!  We must give up our rights of privacy in order to have them!

Talk about doublespeak!!

Here is how Glenn Greenwald -- referring to Orwell -- summarized the Obama administration's vehement opposition to the measure shortly before the vote was taken.

Using Orwellian language so extreme as to be darkly hilarious, this was the first line of the White House's statement opposing the amendment: "In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens" (i.e.: we welcome the debate that has been exclusively enabled by that vile traitor, the same debate we've spent years trying to prevent with rampant abuse of our secrecy powers that has kept even the most basic facts about our spying activities concealed from the American people).

The White House then condemned Amash/Conyers this way: "This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process." What a multi-level masterpiece of Orwellian political deceit that sentence is. The highly surgical Amash/Conyers amendment - which would eliminate a single, specific NSA program of indiscriminate domestic spying - is a "blunt approach", but the Obama NSA's bulk, indiscriminate collection of all Americans' telephone records is not a "blunt approach". Even worse: Amash/Conyers - a House bill debated in public and then voted on in public - is not an "open or deliberative process", as opposed to the Obama administration's secret spying activities and the secret court that blesses its secret interpretations of law, which is "open and deliberative". That anyone can write a statement like the one that came from the Obama White House without dying of shame, or giggles, is impressive.

And so, just like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, almost ALL of our communications are being collected, scrutinized, analyzed and stored in giant databases.  What will be done with all this massive data?  Only Big Brother knows!

DN - Glenn Greenwald on the Growing Backlash Against NSA Spying

The Hallowed "Rule of Law"

Trey Smith

If you don't know, the United States of America believes in the "rule of law." How do we know this? Because our leaders tell us about how hallowed the "rule of law" is. They talk about it frequently. They say that this is what separates our great nation from others. In our nation -- unlike so many others -- the laws apply equally and no one is above the law. (I'm laughing my butt off simply typing those silly sentiments!)

Because we are such beacons for the "rule of law," President Obama and several members of Congress have chastised the Russians for not turning over to us one Edward Snowden. We have a legal indictment, they say. The "rule of law" demands that Russia comply with our extradition order and, if they don't, it goes to show that we believe in the "rule of law" far more than they do.

Yes, the "rule of law" is vitally important to our leaders...except in the innumerable cases when it is not! For example, Glenn Greenwald points out a recent situation when the "rule of law" didn't mean diddly squat.

In 2003, two dozen or so CIA agents kidnapped an Egyptian citizen from a street in Milan where he was living after Italy granted him asylum from persecution by the US-allied Mubarak regime. The CIA then rendered their kidnapped victim back to Egypt where he was interrogated and tortured. Italian authorities criminally charged the CIA agents with kidnapping, and after the US refused to turn them over for trial, they were convicted in abstentia. One of them, Milan CIA station chief Robert Lady, was sentenced to several years in prison. I wrote about that case, and US behavior in it, several months ago: here.

Lady ended up in Panama, and when the Italians learned of this, they requested his extradition to Italy. The US government intervened and applied significant pressure to Panamanian officials, who, yesterday, predictably released Lady and put him on a plane back to the US. The next time the US lectures the world about the rule of law and need for accountability, I'm sure this incident will be on many people's minds. It should be.

Also: for those in official Washington - including its press corps - who have been demanding that Edward Snowden come and "face the music" of the charges against him, will you be demanding the same of CIA official Robert Lady, who - unlike Snowden - has committed serious crimes (kidnapping) and has been convicted of those crimes?

Hmm. Rather interesting, don't ya think? Italy is supposed to be one of our allies and yet their "rule of law" doesn't impress us. The Obama administration swept it away with the flick of a hand.

The "All Inclusive" Doctrine

Trey Smith

The Washington Post [on Monday] has a long profile of Gen. Keith Alexander, director the NSA, and it highlights the crux - the heart and soul - of the NSA stories, the reason Edward Snowden sacrificed his liberty to come forward, and the obvious focal point for any responsible or half-way serious journalists covering this story. It helpfully includes that crux right in the headline, in a single phrase:

For NSA chief, terrorist threat drives passion to "collect it all," observers say.

What does "collect it all" mean? Exactly what it says; the Post explains how Alexander took a "collect it all" surveillance approach originally directed at Iraqis in the middle of a war, and thereafter transferred it so that it is now directed at the US domestic population as well as the global one:

"At the time, more than 100 teams of US analysts were scouring Iraq for snippets of electronic data that might lead to the bomb-makers and their hidden factories. But the NSA director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, wanted more than mere snippets. He wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency's powerful computers.

"'Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack,' said one former senior US intelligence official who tracked the plan's implementation. 'Collect it all, tag it, store it. . . . And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it. . . . .

"It also encapsulated Alexander's controversial approach to safeguarding Americans from what he sees as a host of imminent threats, from terrorism to devastating cyberattacks.

"In his eight years at the helm of the country's electronic surveillance agency, Alexander, 61, has quietly presided over a revolution in the government's ability to scoop up information in the name of national security. And, as he did in Iraq, Alexander has pushed hard for everything he can get: tools, resources and the legal authority to collect and store vast quantities of raw information on American and foreign communications."

Aside from how obviously menacing and even creepy it is to have a state collect all forms of human communication - to have the explicit policy that literally no electronic communication can ever be free of US collection and monitoring - there's no legal authority for the NSA to do this.
~ from The Crux of the NSA Story in One Phrase: 'Collect It All' by Glenn Greenwald ~

If nothing else, this doctrine of "All Inclusive" underscores the unhealthy marriage of an out-of-control Executive Branch with the sliminess of corporate capitalism. Whether we're talking about government-backed spooks or the typical manner in which big business operates, both entities want to enjoy unfettered domination with little oversight and almost no inherent responsibilities.

The Executive Branch -- through its designee, the NSA -- claims to hold the unilateral power to abrogate the 4th and 5th Amendments of the US Constitution as well as any law or regulation that seeks to constrain it. In this new world, the privacy of citizens no longer exists, but almost everything the Executive Branch does is private by its very nature. And so, every shred of data or communication that originates from us is seizable, but almost anything the Executive Branch does is shrouded in secrecy.

It is bad enough that the Executive Branch under the tutelage of Dubya and Obama has become the enemy of freedom and democracy, but all they have done is to take a page from the playbook of Corporate America. This is the way the titans of capital have behaved for a long time.

In a recent case heard before the US Supreme Court, a particular company sought the ability to patent human DNA! From their standpoint, every minute piece of our bodies was open game for their private profits. This company was not asking to patent merely a specific strand or two of DNA, but sought the ability to patent all of it!

Fortunately for us -- at least in the short-term -- the often conservative court threw up a major roadblock. As explained at Wikipedia, the court held that

Naturally occurring DNA sequences, even when isolated from the body, cannot be patented, but artificially created DNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.

Take a look at what Monsanto is trying to do -- rather successfully, I might add -- where it concerns seeds used in agriculture. This agricultural giant wants to corner the market on seeds. If you plant a crop, then they want you to be forced to buy seeds from them. And since they are tinkering with the genetic makeup of seeds, they stand a good chance of wiping out all non-patented seeds by the end of the century.

You see, this is THE overarching goal of capitalism: monopoly. In the perfect capitalistic world, the financial titans are able to wipe out all competition, so that one behemoth per industry or sector is left standing. This behemoth becomes the master and the rest of us its slaves. We must live on THEIR terms. If we try to stand against them, they have the capability to squash us like bugs.

While both the Executive Branch and the capitalist class mouth the words democracy and freedom, they don't favor either in terms of anyone but themselves. They want unfettered freedom to do whatever they want without the constraints of even a modicum of responsibility. For the rest of us -- the unwashed masses -- the formula is just the opposite. Our freedoms are constrained, while our responsibilities are myriad.

Is the kind of world you signed up for?

Microsoft Aiding Government Spooks

Trey Smith

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;
• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;
• Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
• Skype, which was bought by Microsoft in October 2011, worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow Prism to collect video of conversations as well as audio;
• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

~from Revealed: How Microsoft Handed the NSA Access to Encrypted Messages by Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, Spencer Ackerman and Dominic Rushe ~

So much for Microsoft's big ad campaign in which they boast, "Your privacy is our priority"! It turns out that your privacy isn't all that important to them.

There are many things I could write about the newest revelations from The Guardian, but what amazes me is that NO ONE from Microsoft leaked ANY of this information. The folks at Microsoft would have us believe that they were unwilling partners and only went along with these nefarious programs because they were compelled to do so by law. Even if that is true -- I find that claim extremely dubious -- it boggles my mind that there wasn't at least one Microsoft employee with a conscience who might have leaked even a smidgen of what was really going on.

There is another aspect to this growing story that I haven't seen much reporting on and I hope The Guardian or some other publication addresses: The money angle. Whenever we find the government and corporations in bed together, we always find that the latter benefits financially from the illicit relationship. Since, in this instance, Microsoft was working hand-in-hand with the FBI, how much taxpayer funds do they regularly receive to betray the privacy of their customers?

If anyone is interested, you don't have to fall prey to Microsoft. You can switch to an easy-to-use operating system like the open source Linux Mint.