NSA Troll Clapper Now Admits 4th Amendment Was Violated (Though He Doesn't Put It So!)

"Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for the purpose of a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open." - Thomas Jefferson, in 'Notes on Virginia'.

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED." - Thomas Jefferson, 'Notes on Virginia'.

Less than a year ago on this blog I pointed out there were likely "thousands of 4th amendment violations"  thanks to the scurrilous NSA programs PRISM, MUSCULAR, XKeyscore.  See e,g,
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/08/thousands-of-4th-amendment-violations.html

Now, we know there were millions, thanks to NSA troglodyte James Clapper's recent admissions of warrantless wiretaps.  Before examining Clapper's admission (which was cloaked in a pseudo-legalese cover) let us note the 4th amendment is very clear on the limits of warrants and how they are issued. The specific wording is:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Note, “secure in one’s person, house, papers, effects” implies PRIVACY! These are after all MY private papers, my private effects, my house, etc. If an inherent right to privacy was a myth then by all accounts being secure in one’s person, papers, effects wouldn’t matter. Hell, let the whole freakin’ world see ‘em! This is why in a fascist dictatorship “personal effects” don’t exist. “Personal papers” has no meaning. The state has full monopoly, de facto ownership on whatever the person has, even his own body. Hence, in fascist dictatorships, such as existed in Nazi Germany, all personal effects, papers could be seized by the Nazis on a whim or remote suspicion - under the Reich Laws. (The Reich laws, as Konrad Heiden notes, altered Weimar laws to render what had been originally illegal, legal.)

Clapper has finally admitted that the National Security Agency had a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a "legal authority"  enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant. This was revealed in top-secret NSA documents provided to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provided the NSA with a "loophole"  potentially allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans".

Now, we know - thanks to Clapper's admissions in his letter, the searches were indeed warrantless - and hence in violation of the 4th amendment.  This is according to the most recent Guardian report,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/01/nsa-surveillance-loophole-americans-data

According to Clapper, quoted above, NSA "performed warrantless searches on Americans' emails and phone calls."

We must not only thank Edward Snowden for the original revelations, but also Sen. Ron Wyden for keeping after Clapper to respond to his letters and 'fess up.  (After all, Wyden already knew the little rat lied before a Senate Intelligence Committee last March when asked directly if the NSA conducted mass surveillance of Americans.)

Of course, to Clapper 'fessing up isn't the same as it is for the rest of us. NO, it means delivering a mealy-mouthed wad of euphemistic babble which - for the weaker minded- is designed to assuage any doubts that it was legal by baffling with bullshit. Clapper's exact words as reported by The Guardian:

"There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.

These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the Fisa court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.”


Pay attention to the last sentence in particular, because this is where the attempted exculpation of his misbegotten agency resides.  He claims the "queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the FISA court" but what were these anyway?  In fact, nothing more than the merest fig leaf. The merest cover to defend the searches (i.e. one "end" of a phone call is in a foreign country, say Barbados).

Most of these came under Section 702  of the misnamed "Patriot Act" - which the traitors in congress also helped approve. As Clapper pointed out:

“As you know, when Congress reauthorized Section 702, the proposal to restrict such queries was specifically raised and ultimately not adopted,”

So congress punked out, When the opportunity arose to protect citizens' rights under the 4th amendment, congress shat on it, and refused to adopt the protections. Traitors!  Let us also recall congress - instead of prosecuting the Bushites for their warrantless wiretapping - made those illegal searches LEGAL!  Thus, they perverted the existing 1978 FISA law as fully as Hitler and the Nazis perverted the original Weimar laws into "Reich laws". The point is that using such a nefarious tactic any act which was once condemned as illegal can be made "legal" - all that's needed is the political will and power to do so.   This is why Clapper insists in his letter that the procedures were "consistent with the statutes and the 4th amendment".

In fact they were not! The 4th amendment is clear in its wording - as I showed above. Individual warrants must be issued for individual acts. And no amount of perturbing the language or making laws that were once illegal, legal can alter that. In this sense, the laws that legalized the original warrantless wiretaps of the Bushites are themselves baseless and LAWLESS.  They overturned the real laws that afforded genuine protections in return for mock laws.

Senators Wyden and  (Mark) Udall,  in their response to the Clapper bafflegab, were blunt:

“This is unacceptable. It raises serious constitutional questions, and poses a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans. If a government agency thinks that a particular American is engaged in terrorism or espionage, the fourth amendment requires that the government secure a warrant or emergency authorization before monitoring his or her communications. This fact should be beyond dispute,”

If congress really had the interests of Americans at heart, and the protection of their 4th amendment rights, they'd have prosecuted the Bushite criminals, as they ought to have for their torture and rendition exercises - and illegal wars.  But they punked out! They refused to exercise their authority to uphold the actual laws, much as the Nazis - once in power- overturned the existing Weimar legal infrastructure in the Enabling Act. 

The tragedy is that by legalizing lawlessness - as regards the Constitution and citizen rights - the country has proceeded down the path of a "gangster state"- to use the words of deep politics authors Michael Parenti, as well as Chris Hedges, see e.g. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bradley_manning_and_the_gangster_state_20130821

The Senators final comment is one which to which we all need to pay heed:

“Today’s admission by the Director of National Intelligence is further proof that meaningful surveillance reform must include closing the back-door searches loophole and requiring the intelligence community to show probable cause before deliberately searching through data collected under section 702 to find the communications of individual Americans."

NSA Gnome James Clapper: A Dope or a Nut?

It appears the liar and 4th amendment traitor James Clapper went on a tirade yesterday, demanding whistleblower Edward Snowden "return all the stolen documents" and calling the surveillance disclosures published by the Guardian, Washington Post, NY Times and other news outlets a “perfect storm” that would endanger American lives."  Of course, this is a pile of horse manure, as ripe as Clapper's LIES before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March of last year. So bad, that Patriot Act co-author James Sensenbrenner was led to assert in October(to the Guardian):

"Oversight only works when the agency that oversight is directed at tells the truth, and having Mr Clapper say he gave the least untruthful answer should, in my opinion, have resulted in a firing and a prosecution,"

And as for endangering American lives let's be mindful of Bruce Schneier, a security specialist, who wrote in The New York Times last July 3rd:

"The argument that exposing these documents helps the terrorists doesn't even pass the laugh test; there's nothing here that changes anything any potential terrorist would do or not do."

Evidently also, Clapper and his other NSA troglodytes never received the 'memo' that Snowden's documents are already electronically 'out there'  - in the proper hands of media sites that have agreed to disclose the content in quantized measures - as opposed to giant dumps. Even if Snowden were to agree to give back what he actually took, the copies of the documents would remain in cyberspace. Making one wonder if Clapper is a dope or a nut.

Reinforcing this, is that Clapper - arrogant ass that he is - offers nothing in compensation to Snowden - other than a "trial" (read kangaroo court mock trial) if he returns with what he has.  Is he joking or what? Why on earth should Snowden come back with his material to face a jury-rigged trial, likely from a military court, and a judge as biased as the one that sabotaged the Garrison case against CIA contract agent Clay Shaw?

Again, the sign of un unbalanced dope whose hubris and power have clearly gone to his head. Even more laughable, according to the Guardian account:

"Testifying before a rare and unusually raucous public session of the Senate intelligence committee that saw yet another evolution in the Obama administration’s defense of bulk domestic phone records collection, Clapper called on “Snowden and his accomplices” to return the documents the former National Security Agency contractor took, in order to minimize what he called the “profound damage that his disclosures have caused and continued to cause”.

Again, this is bollocks. The damage amounts to nothing, not one thing. The REAL damage is to these disgusting spooks whose act has finally been exposed for the world to see and who believe they have a license to gobble up everything about people in their metadata grabs. (And again, Obama is just as wrong to defend them- though as I've written before, he's likely coerced by their threats to do so.)

Clapper's "accomplices" bunkum is also choice, and an apparent imitation of the idiot Mike Rogers' recent rants about Snowden having "allies" in the FSB or Russian Intelligence. This despite the fact that Snowden has repeatedly said he acted alone in assembling and leaking a vast trove of information on the scope of US surveillance efforts.

Clapper also appears ignorant of the fact this was a conclusion  reportedly reached by the NSA’s official investigation into the Snowden leaks. SO again, he's either a dope or totally incompetent - if he isn't even aware of the conclusions reached by his own NSA.


 At the hearing, senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat whose questioning last March ended with Clapper lying to the panel about the deliberate collection of Americans’ data, pressed Clapper to give public answers on surveillance activities on American information “sent over the web or stored in the cloud” – references to NSA’s so-called “upstream” collection capabilities, which allow the agency to harvest data in transit. He also questioned Clapper on whether the NSA had conducted “warrantless searches” for “specific” Americans’ identifying information in its vast databases of foreigners’ internet content, an authority first reported by the Guardian.

“Can you tell us today whether any such searches have ever been conducted?” Wyden asked. To which Clapper responded:

“Senator Wyden, I think, at a threat hearing, this would ... I would prefer not to discuss this and have this as a separate subject. There are very complex legal issues here, I just don’t think this is the appropriate time or place,”

In other words, 'we gotta do these mass  metadata grabs but we can't provide you with any evidence to justify them'.  Confirming what many of us in deep politics already suspect, that the "terror" card is being played as an expeditious smokescreen to cover up an all -encompassing industrial -economic espionage program and - as a byproduct -  to monitor the masses. The last thing the security state wants to see, or be caught off guard on, is tens of thousands rioting in the streets and burning cars, etc. - as they are in the Ukraine.  This is irrespective of whether the cause is fouled water, as recently occurred in West Virginia, or because a new Occupy movement takes hold to mobilize against the banksters and Tom Perkins' spoiled rich.

Above all, the masses must be monitored so they can be controlled. Hence, the use of a mass grab spy program to compile lists of "enemies of the state" for Main Core.

Another misbegotten canard is Clapper's insistence that the mass data grabs are allowed under current law. Let me assert if this is the case, that law is an 'ass' and in violation of the 4th amendment. The reason is that even a cursory reading of the 4th amendment shows the wording is predicated on individualized warrants! Hence, you cannot have a collective seizure of data that conforms to the heart of the amendment. What Clapper is really defending is the bastardized version of the FISA law that was created and approved AFTER the Bushies were caught out doing warrantless wiretaps in 2006-08.

Again, for those with short memories, the original (1978) FISA law required individual warrants which had to be sought from a proper FISA court.  After Bush and his thugs were caught breaking it, congress - instead of prosecuting them - took the easy way out and made legal what had been illegal!  In other words, the "law" now on the books is an affront to not only the 1978 law, but the 4th amendment and was composed by traitors!

Perhaps the real reason Clapper and his NSA clones are frothing at the mouth  about Snowden and his disclosures was best expressed by a commenter on the Guardian forum (for the Clapper article):

·        Lightning strikes 300 Americans a year. Huge by comparison to terrorism. Maybe the real reason is the military budget. They cannot live without a threat equal to 20th century warfare. Why don't we let them defend us against space aliens? Terrorism is way down from the 1970s and paradoxically appears to be a receding threat. Ok, the worst months of Vietnam killed 2000 soldiers. It took years running two wars to reach that level. Times change. The real discussion is about making the citizens of America a replacement threat for the Pentagon to keep their budget. They have to do it in secret because the US is a Constitutional state.

Don't Pin The "Traitor" Label on Edward Snowden - Pin It on Congress!

As the predictable calls for ‘punishment’ from predictable political hacks and blow –dried blow heads fill the air, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s admission to being the PRISM-Verizon leaker, the deep politics maven can easily discern who the real criminals are, as well as traitors. They are exactly the ones who have used and continued to exploit “security” to eviscerate civil liberties. They are also the ones who’ve consistently abetted the corporate bankster spy warmonger state invested in perpetual war and massive debt. These rats want to keep obscuring the real reasons for their Big Brother spy state.

What is most amazing is how the real traitors (like Peter King, R-NY, bloviating this morning on CNN) have depicted Snowden to be “dangerous” when they are the ones who’ve led us into this fascist panopticon. They are the ones who’ve effectively taken away right after right while hoodwinking the public into believing this shackling of liberties is needed to make us safe,

Normon Solomon aptly wrote in his blog this morning:

“The corporate-government warfare state is enraged that Edward Snowden has broken through with conduct and values that are 180 degrees in a different direction. “I’m not going to hide,” he told the Washington Post on Sunday. “Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest."


When a Post reporter asked whether his revelations would change anything, Snowden replied: “I think they already have. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten -- and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”


But as I indicated in a post 2 days ago,  presumption of privacy underpins fourth amendment rights. So the real question is whether people are willing to sacrifice their 4th amendment rights to the surveillance state. I for one, am not. I would rather that the whole surveillance state be disassembled and the money saved ($300b a year) than that me and fellow citizens are surveilled 24/7 out of fear that the odd terror attack will occur, which in any case isn’t likely to even claim as many lives as the Aurora Theater massacre. Even if it surpassed that, the numbers would pale besides the gun homicides just in Chicago the first five months of this year.


Look, death is inevitable. It comes to us all sooner or later, and could be violent and unexpected - say being murdered by a psycho with an AR-15 or via accident in a tornado. It could also be less violent say by disease (cancer) or other agency. My point is that it is stupid to drown all civil liberties in order to try and stop all deaths from terrorists. It is not only stupid but unrealistic, as well as hypocritical – since the super spy state doesn’t seem to have any problem with sporadic sudden killings or even massacres (Virginia Tech, Newtown) arising from gun-slinging "micro-terrorists".

I’m talking about those whackos – like the Santa Monica shooter- offing a few citizens at a time with their 150 rounds of ammo pumped out with AK-47s or AR-15s. Yet when robed loonies commit a terror act or try to, everyone goes bonkers and want to impose draconian laws that effectively kill all 4th amendment rights! What’s the difference? I don’t see any! People suddenly offed in a "terror attack"  or  by a lone psycho in a theater massacre meet the same end! Yet in the one case we go batshit crazy and totally eviscerate 4th amendment rights- the very ones that distinguish us as Americans, while in the other we leave 2nd amendment rights untouched. Schizoid nation anyone?


But it gets to the heart of what columnist Al Lewis noted yesterday (‘Dirty Bomb Blows Liberty’. D. Post, WSJ 2):

“Here’s how terrorism works: slaughter people on national TV and watch as a nation that prides itself on freedom, shackles itself.


What Lewis captured here is the anomaly of a nation that boasts of all its freedoms and how our soldiers are “fighting for our freedoms” yet is willing to dump them all at the first hint of uncanny or sudden slaughter – by perpetrators in robes. What this tells me, and obviously tells Lewis, is those freedoms we brag so much about don’t mean that much in the end. They are expendable if it means the large majority of citizens can have the illusion they are saved if the gov’t is pouring through all their phone calls, data to try an catch an odd "bad guy".

Oh and by the way, the recent claim by Obama officials that the NSA spying system made us safer by thwarting the New York subway bombing plot was already thoroughly debunked by news organizations and Intelligence Committee member Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO)  within a few days- in case you missed it.


So when you hear those like John McCain and others (Dianne Feinstein, Lindsey Graham etc.) calling for Snowden’s head, be aware that congress have been the real traitors. First, they expediently passed a civil liberties gutting law they themselves never read – I am referring to the Patriot Act in 2002. Second, after learning the Bushies broke the law with their illegal wiretaps and violations of the 1978 FISA law, instead of holding the law breakers accountable they rewrote the FISA law to make it comport with the law breaking! Treason! This is exactly why appeals to legal backing for what is going on now are absurd. There is no real legal backing only the illusion of such, since the actual law, legal backing was renunciated out of cowardly expediency. "Legal parameters"  for this mass surveillance, as a CNN talking head tried to insist this morning? In your dreams!

Third, when a last final chance arose in 2011 to rectify things by halting renewal of the bogus FISA act, congress again punked out. They knew what they were doing but out of political expediency voted for this abomination. Treason three times! So now, having traitorously implemented a false legal structure they want to go after all those real patriots who seek to expose the shell game to which citizens are being subjected.


So all of the talking heads and political hacks you hear or see this morning, pouring condemnation on Snowden is merely an attempt to shift the focus of outrage away from the potentially major crimes against the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. What’s interesting is all the yappers emphasizing the “grave violation core values” in the disclosure of the potentially unconstitutional mass surveillance, not the mass surveillance itself. Which is mind boggling!


Same thing for NSA Honcho James Clapper. What’s “reprehensible” to him is the disclosure, not the NSA’s potential crimes. Notice, too, that neither Clapper nor Justice officials are calling for an investigation into Clapper committing  one of recent history’s most explicit acts of perjury when answering congressional questions about surveillance (and yes, perjury before Congress is a criminal act) In this distorted worldview, Edward Snowden’s decision to expose the NSA’s potentially unconstitutional behavior is somehow presented as a bigger crime than the NSA’s behavior itself.


In his writeup of the Manning trial, Matt Taibbi sums up what is really at stake in the reaction to all of these information disclosures.

“If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal,” he writes. “Who’s the right kind of person to be let in the know about the fact that we systematically turned academics and other ‘suspects’ over to the Iraqi military to be tortured? We want people who will, what, sit on this stuff? Apparently the idea is to hire the kind of person who will cheerfully help us keep this sort of thing hidden from ourselves.”

As blogger David Sirota puts it:

“The same can be asked about the NSA surveillance revelations. Do we really want to criminalize public officials who expose possible violations of the Fourth Amendment? Do we really want those public officials to witness such crimes and say nothing? Doesn’t that make them complicit in crimes that are far bigger than the alleged crime of blowing the whistle?”

In many ways, those of us who lived through the Kennedy assassination 50 years ago, aren’t the least bit surprised. The coup d’etat that murdered Kennedy, likely engineered by the CIA, set the nation off on a course of war mongering and mass surveillance. Since up to now we haven’t honestly addressed the Kennedy assassination as what it was, a coup d’etat (preferring to believe the lone nut myth), we haven’t gotten to the rot eating away at the nation’s underbelly. It had been hoped in this anniversary year progress might have been made when more files were released, but the National Archives has ordered them unavailable- at least until 2017.


Then people wonder why there are leaks!

Normon Solomon again:

“The gratitude that so many of us now feel toward Edward Snowden raises the question: How can we truly express our appreciation?

A first step is to thank him -- publicly and emphatically. You can do that by clicking here to sign the “Thank NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden” petition, which my colleagues at RootsAction.org  will send directly to him, including the individual comments.”

Bravo to you, Mr. Snowden! And on behalf of those of us who are genuine patriots - not the paper kind who prefer safety to civil liberties- we thank you for your courage and hope you find safe refuge someplace on this forlorn planet.