WSJ's 'Deep State' Conspiracy Buffoons Flail While Trying To Defend Barr Interfering In Flynn Case

"Ummmm....let's see, what more dopey crap can I write as a proper cockroach on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed staff? Oh yeah, let me go after Mueller, Emmet Sullivan and unmasking Flynn again!"

"Trump and his followers have been routinely advocating the jailing of Trump's political opponents without an investigation, criminal charges, trial or conviction by a jury of their peers. This is the way fascist dictators dispose of their political opposition."=    Lucian K. Truscott IV, smirkingchimp.com 


The hysteria about Michael Flynn and his "unmasking"  - displayed openly in the WSJ's op-ed pages the past week -  provides a graphic insight into full blown collective madness. (So one can grasp why all these WSJ op-ed stooges are likely on opioids or MJ candy). Start off with Dan Henninger ('The Flynn Debuachery', May 14, p. A13)   who insists "a low grade mistake by Mr. Flynn got built into a high stakes prosecution."  Not so!

In fact, the report from the FBI interview, known as the FBI 302, showed clearly Flynn was not coerced in any way, and further was given every chance to take an honorable out.   To that end during the interview the agents gave Flynn every opportunity to come clean, even parroting back his own words to try to jog his memory. But Flynn insisted on lying about his conversations with the Russian ambassador Kislyak - regarding U.S. sanctions and a UN vote.  Giiven the FBI had intercepts of the phone conversations the FBI couldn't help but notice they conflicted with the public account. 

What's more, the statement filed at the time of Flynn's guilty plea showed Flynn coordinated the substance of his calls to Kislyak with a senior member of the Trump transition team.  A collusion no brainer, hell a conspiracy no brainer.

To jog our own memories, let's recall the Flynn case grew out of phone calls he made to Sergey Kislyak in the final days of 2016, asking that Moscow please refrain from retaliating after the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the election.  The conversations were captured on routine wiretaps of Kislyak and triggered concern among FBI agents investigating Flynn once they learned of them.

And despite all the hubbub about "unmasking" the poor Flynn, or Carter Page, let's please get a grip. In reality.  According to the WSJ's main news section piece on it yesterday (p. A3, 'Unmasking Requests Released') :

"Unmasking U.S. identities in intelligence reports occurs thousands of times annually, according to statistics maintained by the Office of the Director Of National Intelligence."

Henninger like his deranged WSJ colleagues: Kim Strassel ('The Mueller Coverup',  May 8, p. A13), and Holman Jenkins Jr. ('What The FBI Is Covering Up', p. A13, May 13)   as well as the WSJ editors ('The Flynn Unmaskers, Unmasked', p. A14, May 14,  'All The Schiff Transcripts', May 14, 'Judge Sullivan's Bad Judgment', May 14)  fairly screeches detachment from the world of facts and realty at every turn.  For example, 'Henny' barking:

"What's striking is the lack of remorse across the Washington establishment. Unapologetic arrogance on this scale suggests that unmaskings, intelligence abuses and leaks are likely to return as off the books weapons against individuals disliked by the government bureaucracies."

Oh, you mean shifty traitors like Flynn who tried to make side deals with the Russkies before Obama's term had even ended? That who you mean, Henny?


Let's remind ourselves here, given the chaos of Trump World, that Flynn’s case grew out of phone calls he made to Sergey Kislyak in the final days of 2016, asking that Moscow refrain from retaliating after the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia as punishment for interfering in the election. The conversations were captured on routine wiretaps of Kislyak and prompted concern among the F.B.I. agents  once they learned of them.  Agents then began to suspect that Flynn was lying to other Trump officials about the phone calls and were concerned that he was a blackmail risk because Russia knew the truth of the calls

Henny's hysteria over unmasking (like that of the WSJ editors, and Holman Jenkins)  might also have been allayed or diminished had he taken the time to read the main news page story about unmasking (p. A3, same date).  Therein he'd have seen quotations on its importance from Michael Morrell - former acting director of the CIA:

"You can't do your job without it."  

Adding that he used to make unmasking requests several times a month. Missed by these nattering WSJ nabobs too is that unmasking would be a veritable requirement once conversations had also been intercepted by foreign intelligence sources, like the GCHQ in the UK. 

Meanwhile, 'deep state'  fetishist Kim Strassel,   having wallowed in her own form of  conspiracy paranoia (cited earlier),  is outraged that the FBI entered on the basis of Flynn "engaging in conversations with Russian government officials" like it's just a day at the office.  She even expresses passing umbrage at the potential invocation of the Logan Act of 1799, "a law that's never been used to convict an American".   Well, maybe it was never officially needed before, Kim.   She also carps about the "rarely enforced" Foreign Agents Registration Act - as if it's merely on the books for decoration or to fill up space.  But it all falls into place when you see her daft reference to Flynn's "supposed lies".  No, Kim, they were REAL lies, about foreign influence on a top U.S. security asset  - Flynn. 

Today she did herself one better ('Barr vs. The Beltway', p. A15) barking as part of a long, unhinged rant:

"Instead of applauding Barr for divulging these facts, the Beltway has responded with ire. Mr. Barr's transparency threatens to reveal further that the Russia collusion narrative was pure fantasy...to expose how hatred of Donald Trump drove people in power to break rules and destroy norms."

 Jeezus Peace!  The harpy hack is yapping about "people in power" (in the Beltway) "breaking norms and rules" as if on another planet.  So it's little wonder she  appears to forget (perhaps in the same otherworldly MJ haze)  that it was her master Trump who - on July 26, 2016-  openly implored the Russians to hack Hillary's emails. In other words, openly pandering for the commission of the crime that occurred one day later- and set off this whole investigation of Donnie  Bonespurs.  In front of millions, the Orange Turd had baldly blurted:

"I will tell you this, Russia if you're listening, I hope that you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. You will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens."

So Trump, in full public view, asked Russia to hack his political opponent. Does Kim recall any of that? Evidently not. She only recalls the "breaking rules and destroying norms" she wants to recall. Or, the minimum needed to continue to peddle her Fusion GPS- Christopher Steele- Hillary- FBI conspiracy bunkum.   

Indeed, when this twaddle about "investigating the investigators"  first surfaced with Barr in December last year, Chris Hayes on All In (Dec. 10) aptly observed:

"The obvious problem with this theory is that it makes no sense. Remember this, during the campaign the only investigation that became public was the one regarding Hillary Clinton, which arguably lost her the election. But the FBI was investigating Trump at the very same time. No one uttered a word about it. If they were so desperate to bring Trump down you'd think someone would have said something.  They didn't. So the whole conspiracy theory doesn't even hold together."

Now let us cut through all the other fulsome crap that Henny, Kim and Little Holman as well as the brain addled Journal editors have tried to hurl on the wall - hoping some sticks. They all appear to forget or ignore the 434-page report issued last year by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. It concluded the FBI had an “authorized purpose” when it initiated its investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, into the Trump campaign. In doing so, Horowitz implicitly rejected GOP assertions that the case was launched out of political animus, or that the FBI broke its own rules on using informants. 

Strassel also lambasted Judge Sullivan in today's rant, declaring he had "decided to join the smear campaign against Mr. Barr."  Actually, Kim, Judge Sullivan opted to be one  of the few to stand up to Barr's effort to smear the rule of law and equal justice in this country. Can ya dig it? Well, perhaps not in that purple haze!  Kim's other favorite target has been Christopher Steele and she defames him in her earlier (5/8)  hack piece as well, blurting in a separate tirade therein:

"Colleagues of author Christopher Steele had warned the FBI of his poor judgment."

I suspect Kim dredged this tidbit up in the same opioid or MJ haze. that excited her ire against Judge Emmet Sullivan.   But skewering her B.S. is a Financial Times account (Feb. 16, 2018) , that Steele was the "UK intelligence expert on Russia".  It is, therefore, highly unlikely he'd be "fooled" by any kind of false intel or disinformation as Strassel seems to believe. Or that his judgment was in any way impaired or unsound. Indeed, James Nixey, the head of Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia program, informed the AP that sections of the dossier document created by Steele "read exactly as reports from the secret services".

Then there are the sad and sorry WSJ editors ('Judge Sullivan's Bad Judgment', yesterday) who are enraged that someone with principle would not kowtow to Trump's toady Barr. How dare Emmet Sullivan intervene when prosecutors said there was no crime!   But Sullivan wasn't buying that recycled offal, and could smell a rat from a mile away when Barr intervened and did Trump's dirty work for him.  Effectively trying to pardon Flynn so Trump wouldn't look bad doing it just before an election.  Nice handoff if you can get it.  

To justify its stupid stance the WSJ editors merely parrot Barr's codswallop that "Flynn's statements weren't criminal because the interview lacked any investigative legal basis".  But it did and in spades, as numerous legal specialists (nearly 1,800 at last count) have pointed out.  

The Journal's top twits had to also know that Flynn displayed a serious consciousness of his own guilt. He damned well knew what he was trying to set up with Kislyak was wrong and close to treason, however you cut it. (That Logan Act again!) Flynn  himself pleaded guilty twice to lying to investigators as part of a larger inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election - and this was even after agents practically parroted his own original words back to him!

Heading into the sentencing hearing, Flynn was trying to have it both ways—obtaining credit for cooperation and acceptance of responsibility in hopes of a sentence of probation, while minimizing his own wrongdoing. Judge Sullivan would have none of it. He elicited from Flynn the admission that he knew it was a crime to lie to the FBI and his desire to proceed to sentencing rather than withdraw his guilty plea.  Sullivan also spent much of the hearing
expressing his “disgust” and “disdain” for Flynn’s criminal conduct, saying that Flynn had “arguably sold [his] country out,” at one point even accusing Flynn of treason. 

The Journal's goofballs can whine and cry all they want about Judge Sullivan's "bad judgment" but in fact it was fully justified after Barr's stunt.  Given Barr and the DOJ are now "in bed" with Flynn, it makes eminent sense for Sullivan to enlist a third party to help determine how to navigate the legal morass Barr has created.  After all,  a level of judicial integrity and independence is at stake here, even if the WSJ's Trump minions can't see it, or acknowledge it.   Thankfully, Judge Sullivan   appointed  John Gleeson to oppose the Justice Department’s  nonsense.

The position will be as a kind of legal adviser to Sullivan, to wade through the reams of B.S. hurled into the pot by Barr and the DOJ. It is also certain to thrust Mr. Gleeson into an open confrontation with the bombastic baby in the WH and his dog whistle hostages, i.e. supporters.   But  make no mistake, Gleeson - as a former mob prosecutor - will be able to handle whatever Dotard  barks out, even threats.

In the meantime, there is a method behind all this WSJ op ed madness: that is, the roaches incessantly hurling  out their detritus are setting the table for a  bogus claim to go after Obama and his whole "deep state" administration.  So they hope that while the public is focusing on this distraction it will minimize Trump's colossal fail at handling the pandemic.  Already, indeed, we hear and see the Dotard threatening the  jailing of Joe Biden and of Obama himself, as David Plouffe noted last night on 'All In'.  This in a cynical effort to create an "Obamagate" meme and likely October surprise. 

No, folks, as I wrote many times before, you can't make this shit up.  This is the political and health crisis we are in, and all we can hope to do is survive until we can get this Maggot out in November.  In the meantime he will depend on his lapdogs, including FOX, the WSJ op-ed hacks,  Barr, and now Lindsey Graham (who promises an Obama-ite investigation) to run interference for him by throwing up endless distracting smokescreens.

See also:

Law

Brains over Brawn: Judge Sullivan over Attorney General Barr

by P.M. Carpenter | May 15, 2020 - 6:17am | permalink

AND:

Lucian K. Truscott IV

"Obamagate" And "Lock Her Up": Pointing the Way Toward "Heil Trump"

And:

 Conservatives ad the Right

The Pandemic Exposes the Truth: Right-wing "Individualism" Is Just Selfish Garbage

by Amanda Marcotte | May 15, 2020 - 7:27am | permalink

— from Salon.com

And:

Cody Fenwick

Article Tools E-mail | Print Comments (0)

2020 Elections | Donald Trump | William Barr

Trump and Barr’s Big 2020 Gambit Looks like a Big Dud

by Cody Fenwick | May 15, 2020 - 7:15am | permalink

— from Alternet

AND:

William Barr

Can Democracy Survive Bill Barr?

And:

Media

Traditional Media Follows Republicans down Bogus 'Obamagate' Rat Hole

And:

The United States is a country to be pitied

No, You Don't Want To Do 'Aftersex' Selfies

You really want your aftersex selfie to have Newt Gingrich's mug photo-shopped onto it then circulated with your gf?

There are so many reasons not to do "aftersex" selfies that it shouldn't be necessary to enumerate them. Start with the smug, solipsist nature of the "selfie" itself which embodies all the gratuitous self-infatuation that is poisoning this country - causing it to mutate into a bunch of navel-gazing zomboids with faces pushed into assorted small screens - whether of smart phones or iphones.  Let us also recall what Krimhilde, my sister-in-law and Eck spiritualist,  said:

"These are the creations and obsessions of the immature human, which remains steeped in narcissism, in self-absorption. No truly advanced or advancing human on the path to a higher spirituality takes a selfie. Our true motivation and mission in this life is instead to embrace selflessness. That means placing one's body in proper relation to one's spirit."

Wonder what she'd think of the 'aftersex' selfie?  It isn't difficult to imagine and the clue is in the last line of her comment.

But perhaps one isn't spiritually inclined. Then there are other reasons not to traverse the route of this benighted form of selfie:

1- Any instagram, any selfie can go onto the larger web, and can also be used in ways never intended by the original senders.  One such is displayed above with the aftersex selfie twisted into a mocking caricature by having photo-shopped the visage of Newt Gingrich into the guy's face. The poor girl friend is then stuck being seen with this GOOPr goober along side her, while the delirious face of the cat who sent the selfie is nowhere to be found.  (Let's also bear in mind a truly malicious person would use programs superior to photo-shop to superimpose the face of a terrorist onto the selfie, instead of Newt's!)

2- The GCHQ, NSA's Brit cousin, can snatch it up - as it does millions of instagrams, via its 'Optic Nerve' program. As the Guardian noted (Feb. 27), having gobbled up and stored millions of such images, including "sexually explicit" ones it's become increasingly difficult to keep them from the prying eyes of staff. While aftersex selfies are usually not explicit, one can picture GCHQ staff having some good yucks at the assorted ones captured that they gawk at before permanent storage. Besides, do you really want your aftersex selfie stored in some spook outfit's system for decades?

3- This ought to go without saying, but sheesh, if you actually have to post an 'after sex' visual maybe you aren't getting enough in the first place.  I mean why would you need the selfie? To remind yourself for the next 'dry' six months of what you haven't been getting regularly?  So then you can stare freely at the captured sex-satisfied smile and engrave it in memory until the next time?  Oh wait, it's not that at all, it's that you want to rub it in to your friends' faces how much you're getting and they're not! Again, a fool's errand! Most perspicacious people will still perceive you have to "prove" you are getting at least what THEY are getting! And they'll still end up believing that because you had to post it then you ain't getting what they are!

4- The aftersex selfie is gauche and uncool. No really cool person, at least  from a 60s perspective, would have to advertise having had sex.  A hippie couple from the 60s would view this manifestation not so much with disdain or judgment, but look at the senders with a mixture of pity and sympathy.  They'd also kind of tie it in with the perspective in (3).

5- Sexual relations, as Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts once pointed out ('Does It Matter?') are still a basic form of human intimacy. This extends not merely to the sex act itself but to the prelude to it (foreplay) and the post-coital phase which ought to include light banter, snuggling, cuddling - but not dispatching "selfies" to the digital world of 2 billion staring, peering, judgmental eyes.

6- The person who would violate the  boundaries of social propriety by taking an after sex selfie (also according to Watts) would be blind to what constitutes the off-scene or the "ob-scene" in human relations and situations, and hence would also be likely to send a selfie of him (or her)- self sitting on the crapper taking a dump.  Since the person lacks the social perceptions to see what ought to remain private in one domain (sexual), they'd likely lack it in another (bodily elimination) for which privacy is also warranted. (Of course, the exact analogy here would be the "post-dump selfie").

These are just some of the reasons the wise and mature person avoids taking aftersex selfies. Of course, the really wise and mature person avoids taking any selfies, period!

Spooks Go Ape Shit and Scarf Up Over 1.8 million Webcam Images

When does it end? Where does it end? Have the NSA and GCHQ spooks (in Britain)  nothing better to do than snoop on innocent citizens' and grab up their phone logs, email lists, and now Youtube webcam images? According to  documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, a sinister program called "Optic Nerve" began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year. "Optic Nerve" implemented by Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

Got a webcam operating? Then HEY! Maybe you are a terrorist! After all, making porno images now likely counts as "domestic terror" and make no mistake they are all being stored.  According to The Guardian which reported the latest outrage by the spooks:

"GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not. In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally."

The  Guardian added that:

"Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

According to The Guardian again:

"GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place."

The Guardian goes on to note that  Optic Nerve is "eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984", and was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches "could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs."

We also learn the program  "saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation , and also to avoid overloading GCHQ's servers. The documents describe these users as "unselected" – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.

Another document likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.

It noted:

"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face. The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright."


Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.

Bulk surveillance on Yahoo users was begun, the documents said, because "Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets".

Another aspect that ought to get U.S. citizens' attention is that unlike the NSA, GCHQ is not required by UK law to "minimize", or remove, domestic citizens' information from its databases. However, additional legal authorizations are required before analysts can search for the data of individuals likely to be in the British Isles at the time of the search.  There are no such legal safeguards for searches on people believed to be in the US or the other allied "Five Eyes" nations – Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

In other words, all the 'Five Eyes' nations are basically in a proto-fascist panoptycon with the spooks monitoring their moves 24/7.

The spooks are also evidently alarmed at the amount of nudity in these images. Quoting one GCHQ source in The Guardian:

"Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."

See that, you "porno terrorists"?

The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity".

A question that occurs is, if it is so "undesirable" why are the Spooks so entranced by it and grabbing 1.8 million images?

Be warned in advance, peoples!  The Spooks are everywhere and like "Big Brother" from 1984 they are watching you!

Where is  Emmanuel Goldstein when we need him?

The Latest NSA Outrage - And What Snowden Sought to Protect

Even as another militarist (Michael Rogers) is named by Obama to head the NSA, we've learned about the latest NSA outrage: that NSA and its Brit sidekick GCHQ are grabbing up data from smart phone apps, and even games like 'Angry Birds'. Enjoy  'Angry Birds?  Then you're likely now compiled into the NSA's "Main Core" program, along with proven "enemies of the state" and others (e.g. fracking protestors, and OWS folks) deemed such.

We know that with each new generation of mobile phone technology, ever greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies like those ensconced in NSA can pick it up.   According to dozens of previously undisclosed classified documents, as reported by the NY Times yesterday, among the most valuable of those unintended intelligence tools are so-called leaky apps that spew everything from users’ smartphone identification codes to where they have been that day.

As The Times observes:

The N.S.A. and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters were working together on how to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone apps by 2007, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. Since then, the agencies have traded recipes for grabbing location and planning data when a target uses Google Maps, and for vacuuming up address books, buddy lists, phone logs and the geographic data embedded in photos when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services.

Of course, WH tool Jay Carney denied it all, but what would you expect when the snoops probably have all sorts of stuff on him, as well the Obama WH - likely making subtle threats to undermine Obama's legacy and programs (the ACA)  if he doesn't "play ball".  Bear in mind the snoops also had JFK under the gun (literally), as they laid out an assassination program against Fidel (ZR/Rifle) which was then turned on Kennedy. As Peter Dale Scott has reported (Deep Politics Quarterly, Jan. 1994)  this was operated under the NSA and the CIA's  William Harvey with the 'Staff D' connection betrayed on the front cover of Oswald's 201 file. (This indicated a SIGINT or signals intelligence operation run in concert with the National Security Agency or NSA.)

The Times went on to note:

The eavesdroppers’ pursuit of mobile networks has been outlined in earlier reports, but the secret documents, shared by The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica, offer far more details of their ambitions for smartphones and the apps that run on them. The efforts were part of an initiative called “the mobile surge,” according to a 2011 British document, an analogy to the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. One N.S.A. analyst’s enthusiasm was evident in the breathless title — “Golden Nugget!” — given to one slide for a top-secret 2010 talk describing iPhones and Android phones as rich resources, one document notes.

Can anyone believe this? And also the arrogance to outright deny it when the evidence is clear?

The Times again:

Two top-secret flow charts produced by the British agency in 2012 show incoming streams of information skimmed from smartphone traffic by the Americans and the British. The streams are divided into “traditional telephony” — metadata — and others marked “social apps,” “geo apps,” “http linking,” webmail, MMS and traffic associated with mobile ads, among others. (MMS refers to the mobile system for sending pictures and other multimedia, and http is the protocol for linking to websites.)

You want to know why the congress can't support food stamps for our millions of hungry kids, or unemployment benefits for  out of luck long term unemployed? Look no further than this nugget from the Times:

As the program accelerated, the N.S.A. nearly quadrupled its budget in a single year, to $767 million in 2007 from $204 million, according to a top-secret Canadian analysis written around the same time.
 

Got that? Over three fourths of a billion for these snoops. For what? Well to keep the national security state expanding! And they know millions are dumb enough to believe the transparent bilge of "protecting us from terrorists" when the real terrorists are the random mass killers that can open up on innocent kids in a school, a mall, or a movie theater. But the NSA doesn't want to face down the likes of the NRA, oh no! Nor does a cowardly congress. It's easier to confect bogeyman terrorists than to challenge the real enablers. As Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks wrote after the mass shooting in the Columbia Mall:
 

"We have spent billions of dollars in the fight against terrorism — the National Security Agency is maybe 10 miles from the Columbia Mall — when the real terror is right here in our midst, accounting for thousands upon thousands of premature deaths by homicide and suicide, most often impulsive acts made possible by access to guns."

 The Times went on to point out:

Smartphones almost seem to make things too easy. Functioning as phones — making calls and sending texts — and as computers — surfing the web and sending emails — they generate and also rely on data. One secret report shows that just by updating Android software, a user sent nearly 500 lines of data about the phone’s history and use onto the network.
 

Meanwhile, there remain millions of pretend Americans - those who don't deserve liberty because they overvalue a phony security - who will blow these revelations off and still call for Edward Snowden's head. (That he be "brought to trial" - when the format would not even allow him to call public witnesses on his behalf).  I have nothing but contempt for these Americans when my own ancestor, Conrad Brumbaugh, fought in the Revolutionary War for the liberties now being trampled under.

So what did Snowden seek to protect by his disclosures? None other than privacy! As I noted in my June 8 blog post from 2013, secure in one’s person, house, papers, effects” the Fourth amendment 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.  Beyond that, privacy encapsulate an affirmation of our worth as autonomous humans as opposed to being slaves and pawns of the state.

The cornerstones can be said to be:

-  Personal autonomy (the ability to make personal decisions)

- Individuality  
-  Respect
- Dignity

 -Worth as human beings
 

As one privacy source puts it:

Privacy allows us to make our own decisions free from coercion, to totally be oneself and potentially engage in behavior that might deviate from social norms. It allows us the time and space for self-evaluation. Informational privacy is seen as enhancing individual autonomy by allowing individuals control over who may access different parts of their personal information. It also allows people to maintain their dignity, to keep some aspect of their life or behavior to themselves simply because it would be embarrassing for other people to know about it.

Privacy also allows people to protect their assets or to avoid sharing information with others who would use it against them, such as discrimination by employers, educators, or insurers. The ability to control one’s information has value even in the absence of any shameful or embarrassing or other tangibly harmful circumstances.

Privacy is also required for developing interpersonal relationships with others. While some emphasize the need for privacy to establish intimate relationships, others take a broader view of privacy as being necessary to maintain a variety of social relationships.

By giving us the ability to control who knows what about us and who has access to us, privacy allows us to alter our behavior with different people so that we may maintain and control our various social relationships. For example, people may share different information with their boss than they would with their doctor, as appropriate with their different relationships.

Most discussions on the value of privacy focus on its importance to the individual. Privacy can be seen, however, as also having value to society as a whole. Privacy furthers the existence of a free society. Large databases, potential national identifiers and wide-scale surveillance, can be seen as threatening not only individual rights or interests but also the nature of our society. For example, preserving privacy from wide-spread surveillance can be seen as protecting not only the individual’s private sphere, but also society as a whole: privacy contributes to the maintenance of the type of society in which we want to live.

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Minus privacy and its inherent defense via the 4th amendment, we thereby become like  "Winston" the pathetic character from Orwell's '1984' whose flat is riddled with two-way monitors with the image of 'Big Brother'. Winston can't even take a crap without Big Brother's beady, baleful eyes staring down at him. THINK about THAT! When he has sex Big Brother is in the room, and the first thing in the morning Winston's ordered by the Oceania Officer on the screen to do his calisthenics and if he loses tempo for an instant he must repeat them.

This is the world we effectively have now via NSA mass snoop technology, and the only reason over three fifths of my countrymen want Snowden taken to a trial is they can't see the value of what he's done. They can't see that had he not done it there'd have been NO scrutiny at all on this secretive agency which Sen. Frank Church once warned us about in frightening terms:

 "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return"- 

 

To me, this makes the mock Americans who want Snowden tried no better than the good Germans of the Nazi era.  Those degenerates sided with Hitler, praised him and embraced his ideology while turning a blind eye to the multifold wrongs. The last straw was the Enabling Act (1933) which essentially obliterated the last vestiges of the Weimar Republic. These "good Germans" - state loyalists to a fault-  lost the last vestiges of their democracy from right under their miserable noses because they were too dismissive of the clear warning signs all around them. They had it nice and comfy thanks to Herr Hitler, so why rock the boat?

After our military dragged these “good Germans”  into the remnant concentration camps-  to see first hand what their Fuhrer and his minions did- they wished to hell they had rocked the boat. They were marched in and forced to look at the naked, gassed bodies stacked like cordwood until they puked.

Meanwhile, our then military leaders rounded up the remaining high profile Nazis, including Hermann Goering (see photo below) ,


 and dragged them before a Tribunal to be accountable for their actions. "Following orders" was not an acceptable defense! Under the Nuremberg laws and specifically its Principle IV,  the defendants had to have operated under a higher moral order or conscience, damned the "orders", "oaths" or any other contrived legalistic mumbo-jumbo designed to maintain silence in the face of atrocity.

If a person dismisses the NSA's latest outrages, namely the smart phone metadata seizures, or doesn't believe privacy ought to exist anymore anyway because "someone can always find out about you" then whether they know it or not they're like the good Germans. I'd even go further, and say they're no different from Martin Borman or Hermann Goering.
 

What would my Revolutionary War ancestor  think about these "Americans" now,  nearly 240 years after the War of Independence? He’d likely barf nonstop at the spectacle of what too many of the current crop have devolved to: arrant, ignorant, whiny, weak, sissy consumers,  who’d rather calumniate someone trying to preserve their liberties than recognize the real threat to their existence. He’d then likely crawl back into his grave shaking his head but echoing Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote:

"Those who would sacrifice liberty for a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"

 Am I a civil liberties “extremist”? Damned right if that means a citizen who understands that the Constitution is not just “a piece of paper” (as Bush once called it) and that the rights inherent in the Bill of Rights are real, apply to individuals, and not mere “compromise abstractions” but rather hold the key to American identity – what truly sets us apart. And once those rights are gone, believe me they won’t be coming back!

Those quaking in their boots at Snowden's continued disclosures would do well to bear in mind the words 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."

BINGO!

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/53895/who-needs-the-gestapo-when-you-have-angry-birds

 

 

 

 

Rogue NSA Must Now Be Brought to Heel With the Sensenbrenner-Leahy Legislation!

Newsflash to James Clapper, Gen Keith B Alexander and other lying NSA rats: Ed Snowden is NOT a "traitor" but a 4th Amendment HERO for exposing YOUR Transgressions against the Constitution.

"I don’t understand this being bamboozled into thinking that you have to do this to find bad guys. That’s false. There’s very simple principles you can use to find out who is the bad guy and who isn’t and you can do this without violating anybody’s privacy”. -   Bill Binney, former NSA code breaker on CBS Early Show, June 19

Following the eruption of outrage against Spook Central, aka the NSA, with the spying on major allies (and their lying rot that "they do it too" and "they gave us the data" - which German friends have assured me are LIES) we now see these lying rat fuckers accusing Ed Snowden of being a "traitor" even as major American tech businesses express their own brand of outrage at learning of new NSA interventions into their Cloud sites (mainly overseas) to collect millions of data files.

Make no mistake this agency is out of control and needs to be reined in, big time. And congress needs to shut them up and reprimand them when they get in front of the lawmakers and lie their asses off. But this isn't new. Clapper already showed the lying  rot he's made of, lying to a Senate Committee several months ago, and he has the gall to call Snowden a "traitor"? He is - a traitor to the 4th amendment! 

Patriot Act co-author James Sensenbrenner agreed with Snowden's take on the damage done by this indiscriminate mass spy shtick as he was quoted in a UK Guardian piece ten days ago:

"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,"

Which is sad, because it means the principles of our nation have been stood on their head: the bad guys prosper while the good guys and heroes are turned into refugees or outcasts.

Now, let's move to the latest outrage as reported in The Washington Post, as well as The Denver Post yesterday (p. 1A) and numerous other outlets. According to the Denver Post's report, mainly taken from the WaPo's original account:


"The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, The Washington Post reported Wednesday, citing documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

A secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, indicates that NSA sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters. In the last 30 days, field collectors had processed and sent back more than 180 million new records—ranging from "metadata," which would indicate who sent or received emails and when, to content such as text, audio and video, the Post reported Wednesday on its website.

The latest revelations were met with outrage from Google, and triggered legal questions, including whether the NSA may be violating federal wiretap laws. "

Process that, and then tell me - with a straight face - that the NSA isn't a rogue agency, a spook outfit run amuck, a modern day Frankenstein monster - out of control after its "makers" (the authors of the Patriot Act) looked the other way while the monster got up and wrecked the  global "village".   According to Mark Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Information Privacy Center:

"the fact that it was directed apparently to Google's cloud and Yahoo's cloud, and that there was no legal order as best we can tell to permit the interception, there is a good argument to make that the NSA has engaged in unlawful surveillance,"

When is enough, enough to warrant action on these clowns? How much longer are our lawmakers going to sit on their fat asses and wait before dropping the hammer and bringing them to heel? Isn't it enough they've gutted the 4th amendment for U.S. citizens with their dishonest cant about "protecting us" - and have now outraged most American allies, who've called it a crime in their own right?

The Post goes on to expose the new "tool' used by the NSAssers in addition to PRISM, and XKeyscore":

"The NSA's principal tool to exploit the Google and Yahoo data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency's British counterpart, GCHQ. The Post said NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.


The Post, incidentally, stands by its account and the sources - never mind how the top two lying NSA pricks have called the accounts "lies" or misrepresentation or "not occurring to the best of their knowledge". I mean, these people - if that's what they are, as opposed to alien cyber-bots operating from a "mother ship"- can't even get their own stories straight! Keith Alexander, interviewed by Bloomberg News asserted that "We are not authorized to go into a U.S. company's server and take data. We are not authorized to do that."  Meanwhile, NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines insisted the NSA "had multiple authorities to accomplish its mission".

Yeah, right, Vanee! All "authorities" that the original authors of the legislation never intended you to expand to the levels you did! As the UK Guardian (ibid.) reported,  the author of the Patriot Act, James Sensenbrenner, was up in arms and outraged at how NSA expanded the language in the original act to expand the FISA basis for searches. So the "authorities" Vines claims are obviously based on an unwarranted extrapolation of language never intended by the original author(s). Vines also claimed, dishonestly, that "the assertion we collect vast amounts of data from this type of collection is also not true."

And yet, as the Post has noted, the NSA "was breaking into data centers world wide", and also none of the NSA spooks has denied the MUSCULAR program to do so. Further, if they were telling us the truth why is the techie business bunch, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook, now ready to chew plutonium as they ream the spooks' overstretch out?  According to the (Denver) Post account again:

"David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer said the company has "long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping."

"We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems," said Drummond. "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform."

Google, which is known for its data security, noted that it has been trying to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links. "

And as the New York Times noted yesterday:

"Google has spent months and millions of dollars encrypting email, search queries and other information flowing among its data centers worldwide. Facebook’s chief executive said at a conference this fall that the government “blew it.” And though it has not been announced publicly, Twitter plans to set up new types of encryption to protect messages from snoops."

Further we learn:

"What began as a public relations predicament for America’s technology companies has evolved into a moral and business crisis that threatens the foundation of their businesses, which rests on consumers and companies trusting them with their digital lives."

So they are pushing back in various ways — from cosmetic tactics like publishing the numbers of government requests they receive to political ones including tense conversations with officials behind closed doors. And companies are building technical fortresses intended to make the private information in which they trade inaccessible to the government and other suspected spies. "

Additionally,

"as details of the scope of spying emerge, frustration has turned to outrage, and cooperation has turned to war.  The industry has learned that it knew of only a fraction of the spying, and it is grappling with the risks of being viewed as an enabler of surveillance of foreigners and American citizens. Even before June, Google  executives worried about infiltration of their networks. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the N.S.A. was tapping into the links between data centers, the beating heart of tech companies housing user information, confirmed that their suspicions were not just paranoia."

 Much of the ability to lie is predicated on the loose language in the existing laws and hence the capacity to parse and split meanings at will - for example, in the differences between the geographical domains covered by PRISM and MUSCULAR.  Thus, in order to rein in the  NSA a better, more rigorous law is needed to cover more loopholes, bases and technology.....not to mention tighten language loose enough to drive a Mack truck through, as the NSA has. Merely because these troglodytes possess the technology doesn't mean they have any god-given right under whatever protective ruse, to use it.  This is why U.S. citizens as well as the Tech giants, all need to press and put the heat on congress to pass the new USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Sensenbrenner and Pat Leahy.

To see more go to: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-31/usa-freedom-act-would-leash-the-national-security-agency

 Americans need to work like holy hell, contacting their reps, to get this law passed to bring this rogue Agency under control, unless we soon wish to end up in a Gestapo- Stasi state that none of us will wish to contemplate! ACT NOW!  If you've got weak knees or are in doubt, just recall the words of Sen. Frank Church from 1975:

I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

See also: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-lindorff/52437/what-s-done-abroad-can-be-done-at-home-too-is-nsa-spying-really-about-blackmail