BP - John McAfee vs.The NSA

BP - Is Congress Guilty of Torture?

MR - Burglars Who Broke Into FBI Break Their Silence

Here Is A Story That Underscores a Certain Problem in the Obama Administration

Trey Smith

More than two years after sensitive information about the Osama bin Laden raid was disclosed to Hollywood filmmakers, Pentagon and CIA investigations haven’t publicly held anyone accountable despite internal findings that the leakers were former CIA Director Leon Panetta and the Defense Department’s top intelligence official.

Instead, the Pentagon Inspector General’s Office is working to root out who might have disclosed the findings on Panetta and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers to a nonprofit watchdog group and to McClatchy.

While the information wasn’t classified, the inspector general’s office has pursued the new inquiry aggressively, grilling its own investigators, as well as the former director of its whistle-blowing unit, according to several people, including a congressional aide.
~ from ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Leak Investigators Now Target of Leak Probe by Marisa Taylor and Jonathan S. Landay ~

See the problem, here? Members of Team Obama can leak like crazy -- including classified information -- and EVEN when they are identified, they have nothing to worry about. Not only are they NOT prosecuted, it would appear they aren't investigated, reprimanded or merely chastised.

Oh, but if you expose the culprits or any degree of wrongdoing, that's when the boot of government comes down and it tends to come down very hard. You almost can guarantee that you will be investigated and, in most cases, prosecuted or punished in some other way. It is a proverbial case of shooting the messenger, not the party who actually is culpable.

Yes, indeed. The Obama presidency is the most transparent in US history...NOT! He makes one almost long for the days of Dubya!!

TYT - Battle over Snowden on CNN between Greenwald and Toobin

One Federal Jurist Finally Gets It

Trey Smith

A federal judge on Monday concluded that a National Security Agency program that collects massive amounts of telephone data “likely” violates the Constitution, propelling a high-stakes fight right toward the Supreme Court.

In an extraordinary 68-page decision, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of Washington ordered the NSA to stop snooping on two specific individuals who had challenged the so-called “bulk telephony metadata” collection program. While Leon then put a stay on his own order, pending a government appeal, his skepticism about the program’s constitutional validity came through loud and clear.

“I believe that bulk telephony metadata collection almost certainly does violate a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Leon wrote, taking note of the “almost Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States.”

Appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2002, Leon further cautioned that the 21st century surveillance technologies may have outstripped the decades-old legal precedents being used to justify them. The only way to resolve the dilemma spelled out in Leon’s decision is for the Supreme Court to revisit the issues once the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit takes a crack at it.
~ from NSA Telephone Spying "Likely" Illegal, Judge Says by Michael Doyle and Ali Watkins ~

In this day and age, it almost is surprising to see that a federal judge finally gets it. This bulk collection of almost ALL phone data on the potentially guilty and innocent alike is obviously far over the legal line. It treats those suspected of no wrongdoing like criminals which is something the founding fathers sought to thwart. I mean, why enumerate specific rights of citizens that government is supposed to not breach?

It's even more amazing that the judge who finally got it was appointed by a Republican President, not a Democratic one. If a conservative jurist is alarmed, this only shows that this program has crossed far, far over the line...or maybe Judge Leon is just some crackpot. Maybe the rest of our vaunted judicial system will give the Obama administration what they want: the ability to abrogate the US Constitution whenever they feel like it!

Wouldn't that be a glorious day!

Look No Further Than the End of Your Nose

Trey Smith

The United States needs protection from the people protecting it, always has, and always will. The character of the president isn't the issue. Neither are the individuals running the FBI, CIA, NSA, JSOC, or the Department of Homeland Security. It wouldn't matter if the national-security state was staffed from top to bottom with people I could hand select based on my esteem for their character.

Letting them operate in secret would still be dangerous.

That conclusion isn't something I've derived in the abstract from political philosophy. The best reason to mistrust the national-security state is its track record. Abuses at the FBI, CIA, and NSA go back a long way, as any student of the J. Edgar Hoover era or the Church Committee report can attest in shocking detail. There's no reason to think that generation was more prone to misbehave than ours. But one needn't look to past generations to find good reasons for mistrust.

The War on Terrorism is full of them.
~ from Why Does Anyone Trust the National-Security State? by Conor Friedersdorf ~

There is another reason not to trust the national-security state and each of us can ascertain this reason by looking no further than the end of our nose. When we ourselves operate in secret, are we paragons of virtue?

The answer is almost always NO, not even close.

It is a human penchant to try to get away with as much as we think we can get away with. A person, group or entity can get away with a heck of a lot when operating in secret. When nobody knows what we're up to, it's like a green light to be up to more things than you can shake a stick at. So, it is illogical to think that government leaders and their minions would behave any differently.

This is why many of our laws (mores too) involve varying degrees of constraint or outright prohibition. Left to our own devices, most humans would run roughshod over everyone else. In order to live together in relative peace and harmony, we have created [imperfect] rules to constrain each other from non-harmonious behavior. Those who operate outside of the rules in secret are the most dangerous. History attests to this fact over and over and over again.

Lurking Everywhere

Trey Smith

Online gaming is big business, attracting tens of millions of users worldwide who inhabit their digital worlds as make-believe characters, living and competing with the avatars of other players. What the intelligence agencies feared, however, was that among these clans of elves and goblins, terrorists were lurking.

The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a "target-rich communications network" where intelligence targets could "hide in plain sight".

Games, the analyst wrote, "are an opportunity!". According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other. (emphasis mine)
~ from Xbox Live Among Game Services Targeted by US and UK Spy Agencies by James Ball ~

Why stop with gamers? Chances are there are "terrorists" lurking at the Chamber of Commerce, local PTA or Friends of the Library!

You see, this is what happens when people or agencies become supremely paranoid. You see enemies at every turn. No activity is innocent anymore. You figure that almost anybody is "up to something."

Might there be a bona fide terrorist who is an online gamer? Certainly...but you shouldn't violate the rights of scores of innocent folks just to catch maybe one or two bad apples. There are far more efficient methods for this kind of stuff. As has been pointed out by many, too much data is as dangerous as too little. How can the NSA find specific terrorists within all this data? It would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack 12 miles high!

The Bottom Line Stands Up and Roars

Trey Smith

The world's leading technology companies have united to demand sweeping changes to US surveillance laws, urging an international ban on bulk collection of data to help preserve the public's “trust in the internet”.

In their most concerted response yet to disclosures by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter and AOL will publish an open letter to Barack Obama and Congress on Monday, throwing their weight behind radical reforms already proposed by Washington politicians.

“The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favour of the state and away from the rights of the individual rights that are enshrined in our constitution,” urges the letter signed by the eight US-based internet giants. “This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for change.”

Several of the companies claim the revelations have shaken public faith in the internet and blamed spy agencies for the resulting threat to their business interests. “People won’t use technology they don’t trust,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel. “Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it.”
~ from NSA Surveillance: Tech Companies Demand Sweeping Changes to US Laws by Dan Roberts and Jemima Kiss ~

It seems rather ironic that corporations who regularly spy and collect hordes of data from their often unsuspecting users are demanding that the federal government not spy and collect hordes of data so much from the unsuspecting masses. There is an obvious reason why these tech giants have committed to this drastic action: money. If people don't trust the internet, they might not rely on it so much and this development could put a serious dent in the bottom line of these companies.

There is no way to gauge how serious these outfits are. Only a very naive person would not understand that, at the very least, this could be nothing more than a savvy pr move. Were it not for Edward Snowden, most of the revelations related to this open letter would have remained hidden from public view. The abuses would have been the same, but it's hard to imagine ANY of these corporations going to bat for the rights of citizens out of the apparent blue. My guess is that, as long as the bottom line was not impacted, these giants wouldn't give a wit about possible governmental abuses of power.

That said, beggars can't be choosers. If this open letter helps to create the political will to put some serious constraints on the NSA, then I welcome it. Just don't expect me to sing praises for the altruistic actions of Microsoft or Google.

TYT - YouTube 'Radicalizers' Targeted By NSA

The Partially Lifted Shroud

Trey Smith

President Truman created the NSA with the stroke of a pen at the bottom of a classified 7-page memorandum. Even the name was initially classified. Decades later, the memorandum that acted as the agency's charter remained secret. Reflect on that for a moment. In a representative democracy, the executive branch secretly created a new federal agency and vested it with extraordinary powers. Even the document setting forth those powers was suppressed.

AND

In a representative democracy with a bicameral legislature, Congress was surprised to find that a federal intelligence agency they'd scarcely heard of was bigger and more powerful than one that they'd created. Even after post-Vietnam cutbacks, the NSA counted 68,203 staffers in 1978, making it bigger than all other intelligence agencies combined.
~ from The Secret Story of How the NSA Began by Conor Friedersdorf ~

Over the last few months, the public has begun to learn more about America's most secretive agency. As Friedersdorf makes clear, the recent revelations have been eye-opening even to many of the power brokers. The fact that it has taken this long to learn only the most basic information about the NSA should trouble EVERY American.

Imagine if there had been no Edward Snowden. Imagine if the headlines these past months made only a passing mention of the NSA. Imagine if the NSA still operated in virtual secrecy. Would you feel safer?

Just because we now know of some of the NSA's questionable activities does not mean those activities have come to a halt. But the NSA knows that people are watching them and this offers a degree of constraint, even if only momentarily. An entity that operates in the dark is not constrained by anything. The very fact that the NSA feels constrained at all today is because of the courage and conviction of Edward Snowden as well as journalists like Glenn Greenwald who bravely spoke truth to power.

We owe them our undying gratitude!

Voyeurs of Voyeurs

Trey Smith

Let's think through the troubling implications of the latest surveillance-state news. "The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches," Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher, and Ryan Grim report.

NSA apologists would have us believe that only terrorists have cause to be worried. A surveillance-state spokesperson told the Huffington Post, "without discussing specific individuals, it should not be surprising that the US Government uses all of the lawful tools at our disposal to impede the efforts of valid terrorist targets who seek to harm the nation and radicalize others to violence."

As the story notes, however, the targets are not necessarily terrorists. The term the NSA uses for them is "radicalizes," and if you're thinking of fiery orators urging people to strap on dynamite vests, know that the NSA chart accompanying the story includes one target who is a "well known media celebrity," and whose offense is arguing that "the U.S. perpetrated the 9/11 attacks." It makes one wonder if the NSA believes it would be justified in targeting any 9/11 truther. The chart* shows another target whose "writings appear on numerous jihadi websites" (it doesn't specify whether the writings were produced for those websites or merely posted there), and whose offending argument is that "the U.S. brought the 9/11 attacks upon itself." That could be a crude description of what the Reverend Jeremiah Wright or Ron Paul thinks about 9/11.
~ from The NSA's Porn-Surveillance Program: Not Safe For Democracy by Conor Friedersdorf ~

You know, if we could be confident that government spooks were gathering this sort of information for the sole purpose of preventing heinous acts, we might grant them a bit of leeway. But there is no reason to be confident in this regard. History has shown that our spy agencies collect this type of information on those individuals who are viewed as ANY kind of threat to policymakers or the elite.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was never viewed as the type of person who would foment violence against the government or corporations, yet the FBI was very interested in the man's sexual proclivities. They were interested because of his influence on public opinion and how this influence might force the hand of policymakers.

That's one prominent example among hundreds (or thousands) of other examples. This type of surveillance tends to be used on domestic persons of interest who pose a nonviolent threat to the powers that be.

Does anyone really think that a bona fide terrorist organization would recall one of their agents or provocateurs simply because the fellow liked to view porn on the internet?

MR - Revealed: NSA's 9/11 Talking Points

Is Diplomacy More Important Than Constitutional Rights?

Trey Smith

People in Europe are growing increasingly incensed that the US is “hoovering up” their communications, storing them, and picking through them with mega computers that hunt for key words. But people in the US are growing increasingly angry that the NSA is doing the same thing here at home.

And just as this outrageous international electronic eavesdropping is destroying America’s image abroad and threatening long-held alliances, it is destroying American democracy, and public faith in the Bill of Rights, right here at home.

Not that Alexander and Clapper care. They don’t answer to the American people. They work for the US government, and the government these days -- the president, the Congress and the Supreme Court -- is clearly not “of, by and for” the people. It is of, by and for the corporations and the elite, and that oligarchic power elite, having stolen the country blind over the past several decades, is getting worried that the public is starting to wake up to, and grow restive about it.

The ruling elite wants an all-seeing NSA to keep the public in check, and to enable it to spot, and then to crush, any outbreak of rebellion, as was done so effectively to the Occupy Movement in the autumn of 2011.

It’s probably fair to say that the crushing of Occupy was the first battle of the second American revolution. Looking back someday, it will also probably be recognized as the trial run of the NSA security net.
~ from The Big Question the National Security State Isn’t Asking by Dave Lindorff ~

As Lindorff points out in this column, our higher ups admit that spying on allies might not be such a good thing, but they don't seem to have the same qualms about spying on Americans! So, it won't be all that surprising if NSA reforms end up protecting those in Europe more so than citizens in the US.

What I find the most amazing about these revelations about wide scale "intelligence gathering" is that, for the most part, the politicians and power brokers who support it are the very same people who present themselves as staunch defenders of the US Constitution. We should remember that Obama is a constitutional scholar and many of those on the right rabidly defend the part of the constitution that deals with "the right to bear arms." But when it comes to the part of the constitution that deals with "unreasonable search and seizure," these same defenders go mute!

With a Friend Like This...

Trey Smith

Remember a week or so ago when staunch NSA defender Sen. Dianne Feinstein became all "upset" that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been spied on? Feinstein announced that this was going too far and it had motivated her to introduce legislation to "reform" the nasty NSA. As it turns out, Feinstein has an odd way of defining the word, reform.

The legislation would make clear in no uncertain terms that communication records like phone, email, and internet data can be collected without even an ounce of suspicion, pursuant to the so-called privacy rules already in place. Being silent on other types of data like location information or financial records, it passively condones their collection too, but without even the benefit of the paltry protections in place now. For the first time in history, Congress would explicitly and intentionally authorize dragnet domestic spying programs targeting every day Americans.

The Feinstein bill also makes the current situation even worse. It gives the government a 72-hour grace period to warrantlessly spy on foreigners who enter the US, without even the attorney general approval that is currently required in emergency situations. It explicitly states that none of its provisions should be read to prevent law enforcement from digging through massive NSA databases for evidence of criminal activity. By doing so, it authorizes that specific practice in a roundabout way. Finally, it sets up the prospect of all members of Congress accessing important court orders and other information, but then undercuts this requirement by endorsing current rules and practices that have been used to prevent members of the House from reading foundational documents that could inform the votes they must make on whether to continue these programs.

I think we can call this doubling down! Not only does she not really want to reform anything, she wants to make a bad situation worse. She wants to provide the NSA with the legal permission to do whatever they want to. She wants to grant the NSA the ability to ignore the US Constitution outright.

It also should be remembered that Dianne Feinstein is a D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T, not some rabid conservative who doesn't trust the rabble. She supposedly is a leading member of a political party that historically stood up for the unwashed masses. Sadly, that Democratic Party is dead as a doornail. What we are left with is two parties that represent the same constituency -- the elite. No one is left to represent the rest of us.

If You Thought You Could Get Away With It

Trey Smith

Conor Friedersdorf has an interesting column about the potential for utilizing data gathered from NSA spying to impact the political process. As so many pundits do, he writes that President Obama is above suspicion in this regard, but a future president might not be so ethical.

I don't know why Obama should be given a free pass. When it comes to these pervasive surveillance programs, he and his minions haven't been all that truthful in their official utterances. This president maintains a secret kill list that we wouldn't know about except for a leak. In fact, as many commentators have noted -- including Friedersdorf himself -- we haven't witnessed such a secretive president since Nixon!

From what I can discern, the rationale most often employed by the NSA under Obama (and Bush too) is that anything goes as long as nobody finds out. No idea is too far-fetched as long as they think that they can get away with it. If not for Edward Snowden, all of the programs that have been revealed recently would have stayed hidden and no one would be talking seriously about reining in this rogue agency.

For all we know, the NSA or one of its many contractors has impacted political races already. Since they are hoovering up EVERYBODY'S data, this would include current officeholders and candidates running for office. Not only could the NSA or a contractor use this ill-gotten data and information to swing an election to one candidate or the other, they could just as easily utilize some embarrassing information uncovered to try to intimidate certain lawmakers to vote a particular way.

More than anything else, it would be absolutely shocking to discover that this has never been done to date!

TYT - How To Get Sued By The NSA

Oops! Did We Make a Boo Boo?

Trey Smith

The FBI monitored a prominent anti-war website for years, in part because agents mistakenly believed it had threatened to hack the bureau’s own site.

Internal documents show that the FBI’s monitoring of antiwar.com, a news and commentary website critical of US foreign policy, was sparked in significant measure by a judgment that it had threatened to “hack the FBI website” and involved a formal assessment of the “threat” the site posed to US national security.

But antiwar.com never threatened to hack the FBI website. Heavily redacted FBI documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with the Guardian, show that Eric Garris, the site’s managing editor, passed along to the bureau a threat he received against his own website.

Months later, the bureau characterized antiwar.com as a potential perpetrator of a cyberattack against the bureau’s website – a rudimentary error that persisted for years in an FBI file on the website. The mistake appears to have been a pillar of the FBI’s reasoning for monitoring a site that is protected by the first amendment’s free-speech guarantees.
~ from FBI Monitored Anti-War Website in Error For Six Years, Documents Show by Spencer Ackerman ~

Look, we all make mistakes. Some are silly and inconsequential ones. Others are glaring and far-reaching. The surveillance of antiwar.com -- a site I visit frequently -- falls into the latter category. What's worse, due to all the secrecy surrounding the function of the NSA, CIA and FBI, it is next too impossible to complain about surveillance [by error] when you can't even be sure it is taking place!

We've seen this same kind of problem with some people placed on the No-Fly list. Over the last decade, I've read several accounts by rather innocuous individuals who have been barred from flying domestically or internationally because their name (or something close to it) showed up on the no-no list. When they try to find out WHY they are on the list, nobody can or will tell them. When they try to get their name removed from the list, they hit a brick wall. They are told that there is a good reason their name appears on the list, but "we can't tell you why that is!" If a person is not allowed to know why, it makes it damn hard to prove it is some kind of error.

In this case, however, the documents obtained by the Guardian clearly show a glaring error and it is one that NOBODY in the FBI caught for over 6 years! This kind of revelation does not instill the citizenry with much confidence in the FBI. How could that many trained professionals miss something so obvious for so long?

Of course, there IS another explanation. It wasn't an unknowing error. Maybe the FBI was looking for a justifiable reason to surveil a known anti-war website and, finding none, conjured up this "error" as their ticket in. Later, if the "error" saw the day of light, the FBI could merely say, "Oh, our bad.  Sorry."

Like the Lawless Wild West

Trey Smith

What a week! Shortly after Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that maybe our government had gone "too far" in its surveillance programs, the Washington Post dropped another Edward Snowden bombshell demonstrating that it is going a whole lot farther than we knew.

If Kerry's ersatz admission -- couched in a defense of National Security Agency surveillance -- provoked a collective yawn from many who follow these developments, the latest Snowden stuff snapped us to attention. The Post published an article detailing the NSA's interception of information coming in and out of Google and Yahoo servers over non-public, internal network fibre optic lines. In December, 2012 alone, the program (revealingly called "MUSCULAR") processed 181,280,466 Google and Yahoo records that included email, searches, videos and photos.

Up to now, the NSA has defended its actions by telling us it is combating terrorism through the capture of data in a public space, the Internet, after obtaining court orders. This shows they were lying. MUSCULAR is the theft of about 25 percent of all Internet data from two of the most popular data handling companies with no court orders or advisories in complete defiance of the law and our rights. It is, quite simply, government gangsterism.

And it brings into focus the most important question: why? Because this isn't about counter-terrorism, not with that many records and their surreptitious capture. This is about surveillance and analysis of the daily communications of an entire country and much of the world.

The technology of MUSCULAR, a program jointly carried on by the NSA and its British counterpart, isn't hard to explain. Essentially, technologists at the spy agency have figured out a way to intercept data being exchanged among servers that store everything you do on Google and Yahoo.

Here's the difference between this and other previously revealed spying programs. Your data travels over the Internet to get to those servers and be stored there. For others to see what data you've stored, it must travel out, again over the Internet. That's legally protected data and the NSA (at least theoretically) needs a court order to remove it from those servers. The FISA court (the NSA's blessing source) almost always rubber stamps NSA requests so it's pretty easy to conduct that kind of data extraction but at least there is still a record of what the NSA is looking for and why and some grounds for taking legal action against it.

Muscular doesn't go near the data as it's traveling on the Internet or while it's on those servers. Instead it intercepts data that's already been stored and is traveling through non-public connections between each company's many servers as the companies synchronize stored data or transfer it internally. Internet giants like Google transfer data among their servers constantly in networks of servers known as (you've heard it before) "clouds". This constant transfer helps distribute server activity so that a sudden spike in requests for data on a particular server doesn't crash it (called "load management") or for maintenance, security and other reasons. To do this they use special fibre-optic wires that connect their various servers and are not publicly available.

The data transferred among these servers is typically encoded so nobody can read it without having the decoding keys. That's a security measure. According to these reports, the NSA has figured out a way to decode those formats, then captures the data being transferred by tapping into these internal connections and then, without anyone outside the NSA knowing it, decodes the stuff and analyses it to decide what, if anything, they want to do with it.
~ from NSA Intercepted Data from Google and Yahoo Servers; Monitors Nearly Everyone's Internet Use by Alfredo Lopez ~

What does all this mean? Well, it means that all you folks out there who believe that the Congress, judiciary or President have any sort of power or influence over the NSA have been put on notice that such assumptions are wrong. As the continued revelations point out, the NSA doesn't seem to answer to anyone but itself! (It doesn't answer to itself all that much either.)

This is why I have suggested that it may be impossible to put this genie back into the bottle. Sure, the President can issue directives, Congress can pass legislation and the courts can render decisions, but not one of these branches knows the full extent to what the NSA is up to and capable of. We have to go either on what they tell us -- and lying is their stock-and-trade -- or from revelations disclosed by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. For all Snowden has disclosed, we can only guess that this represents the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The NSA is behaving like a lawman in the lawless wild west. Back in the day, it was often hard to determine the good guys from the bad guys because each side employed what we might call shady practices. Some of the lawmen -- like Wyatt Earp -- spent much of their adult lives bumping back and forth between lawman and outlaw!

Hmm. That might be an apt description for the NSA as well.

What About Wall Street?

Trey Smith

The N.S.A. documents taken by Mr. Snowden and shared with The Times, numbering in the thousands and mostly dating from 2007 to 2012, are part of a collection of about 50,000 items that focus mainly on its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters or G.C.H.Q.

While far from comprehensive, the documents give a sense of the agency’s reach and abilities, from the Navy ships snapping up radio transmissions as they cruise off the coast of China, to the satellite dishes at Fort Meade in Maryland ingesting worldwide banking transactions, to the rooftops of 80 American embassies and consulates around the world from which the agency’s Special Collection Service aims its antennas. (emphasis added)
~ from No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A. by Scott Shane ~

Every time you or I use a debit or credit card, chances are great that this information is scooped up by the NSA and stored in a database somewhere. Write a check, make a deposit or transfer money and the same thing happens. If the NSA has its hands on all these types of transactions, then this should include all the similar types of transaction made by the titans of Wall Street.

So how is it that the US government was caught flat-footed about foreclosuregate? How is it that the UK government was caught off guard by the London Whale and Libor Rate-Rigging scandal? How is it that ANY of the financial shenanigans of the past decade took place and yet there have been few, if any, prosecutions?

This situation offers yet another telltale sign that these ubiquitous spying schemes really have little to do with protection and security. In 2007-08, Wall Street committed what could be termed financial terrorism against the world economy. The NSA and GCHQ could have thwarted these attacks or, at least, brought to justice those responsible for it. But they did neither. They allowed the attacks to commence and those responsible have, by and large, not been held responsible in any meaningful way.

Think about this long and hard. Wall Street is in the business OF banking transactions. They leave digital tracks and trails all along the way. The NSA is vacuuming up these financial transactions and yet no one in the US government shows much of any interest in following the tracks or trails laid out. They could easily nail these suckers by producing secretly gathered ironclad evidence in black and white, but they have chosen not to.

That fact -- in and of itself -- should tell the discerning individual all you need to know about what is REALLY going on here.