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.

Neolib Hack Samuelson Defends NSA Invasion Of Privacy

"In every interview Snowden has relied on the simple notion that informed the founders of our nation regarding the primacy of truth in public discourse.   His commitment to that ideal cannot be comprehended by a mass media culture of careerism informed by public relations that trivializes all differences of truth and logic into incomprehensible mulch. His is instead the simple veracity of the once honored slogan that the truth shall set us free and that it is overwhelming government power that is most threatening to that freedom." - Robert Scheer, on  smirkingchimp.com

I figured that eventually the WaPo Neoliberal hack Robert Samuelson would chirp up in a column to praise the NSA, and diss Edward Snowden - while again seeking to confuse his readers in conflating truths and jabberwocky.   Before even getting to his nonsense, it really ought not be a stretch to grasp that arch-Neoliberals would be wholesale salivating for the national security state, just as they drool for the military.

As Thomas Frank observes in his remarkable expose of the market worshippers, One Market Under God, the Neoliberal basic imperative is "let them eat stocks" (or mutual funds). This despite the fact that since the investment trusts of the 1920s (precursor to today's mutual funds) the traders and brokers have regarded the ordinary public as a "dumb herd" (p. 109) and sheep to be shorn. After the 1960s the message softened  - in order to lure more proles into the market - but the subtext has been the same: popularize the "Street", make people believe they're big shots too, and wait for the crash to suck up their assets.

The main message of the Neoliberal imperative: People must not depend on the government for their security, including for Social Security, veterans' benefits, Medicare or Medicaid.  If they are to sustain themselves they must be cajoled to do it by investment in the market where all factors are "democratized"  - and no one suffers, i.e. by having to pay more taxes so some old fart can get his prostate cancer treatments, or pay his monthly heating bills.

And to ensure this imperative is met, the Neoliberal pushes the political matrix to allocate ever more resources to military and national security interests, thereby leaving little for domestic social insurance programs. This, in fact, is what we beheld last month, when in a "bipartisan" deal, the Dems allowed the Reepos an extra $23b to use for military spending, while their side sucked up the loss in compensating domestic cuts - mainly by disallowing the extension of unemployment insurance.

For the same reason, a hack like Samuelson would plump for the NSA and the overall national security budget (now at $71b /year) increasing - again to put more pressure on domestic spending programs, including food stamps, Medicare etc. Samuelson actually has the nerve to spout this disingenuous tripe:


"There is more than a little hypocrisy to the outcry that the government, through the National Security Agency (NSA), is systematically destroying Americans’ right to privacy. Edward Snowden’s revelations have been stripped of their social, technological and historical context. Unless you’ve camped in the Alaskan wilderness for two decades, you know — or should — that millions upon millions of Americans have consciously and, probably in most cases, eagerly surrendered much of their privacy by embracing the Internet and social media."


Let's back up so that casual readers aren't lured into buying this bollocks. As I noted before, people willingly putting out their information in the expectation of social communication or comity- say on a blog, Facebook page, or Twitter, is NOT the same as having their social intent perverted by some impersonal spook technology to vacuum up every word for filing and cross-referencing.  In the latter case,  collecting every fucking thing surreptitiously then compiling it into a database for which criminal intent or terrorism might later be associated (including domestic terrorism for protesting against a fracking operation, or demonstrating against Wall Street shysters.)  Recall that investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham learned that  NSA's Main Core:

"Can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”


Thus it  ought to be a no brainer that Samuelson's efforts to assuage doubts are not to be trusted. Apart from which, the casual blog poster, or FB poster doesn't expect his words to be collected by these disreputable sneaks and assembled in a program called "Main Core" - because those words were interpreted by some snotty eggheads as being indicative of "an enemy of the state".

None of that downside is noted by Samuelson, but we know this sort of 'dodge and hide' template is his forte.   Indeed, after his initial codswallop Samuelson seeks to further justify it by writing:

"The Internet is a vehicle for self-promotion, personal advertising and the pursuit of celebrity"

Again, even if it is, it doesn't mean people ALSO welcome having all their ruminations, images, beliefs, philosophies compiled by spooks into some nefarious hidden database that regards these as evidence for being an "enemy of the state".  No, people expect that IF that is done - and indeed it is using the NSA's MUSCULAR, PRISM and Xkeyscore programs - they want the fourth amendment followed and that means an individualized warrant brought before a proper FISA court - not the rubber stampers we have now.

Oh, and then we have Samuelson's brilliant  "solution":

"If Americans think their privacy is dangerously diminished, there are remedies. They can turn off their PCs, toss their smartphones and smash their tablets"


Yes, seriously, these are the very words of this character. If you are humbugged by the notion of the spooks vacuuming up all your words, beliefs, pictures and filing them into a Main Core program for "enemy of the state" profiling - you can always disconnect! Toss that Ipad or notebook down the chute and let not your hearts be troubled!

Oh, and then there's the "commercial scare" routine again:


"To these conscious sacrifices of privacy must be added murkier, collateral losses that are orchestrated by the world’s Googles, Facebooks, service providers and “data brokers,” writes Alice Marwick of Fordham University in the New York Review of Books. They scan users’ digital decisions (sites visited, products and services purchased, habits and hobbies favored) to create databases, often merged with other socio-economic information"


But again, Google, Facebook, ISPs etc don't have the power to take away your freedom, like the government does (say by invocation of its 'Continuity of Government' program - with all the data they've gathered on you being an "enemy of the state")

And then the hack strikes again:


"The NSA’s damage to privacy is dwarfed by the impact of market activity...... Suddenly, Big Brother looms. In our mind’s eye, we see the NSA’s computers scouring our every phone call. We’re exposed to constant snooping and the possibility that the government will misuse the information it finds.

The reality is far more limited. The NSA is governed by legal restrictions. It does not examine the full database. It searches individual numbers only after it has determined there’s a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that a number might be linked to terrorist groups"  


Puh-leeze! All of this amounts to disinformation. The same sort of twisted nonsense Samuelson delivered earlier regarding "deficits" being created by JFK, during his administration, which I have already skewered. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/07/thats-right-now-blame-60s-jfk-for.html

The reality is that Samuelson's cited "legal restrictions"  governing the NSA are little better than the merest figleaf. Those (original) restrictions ceased to exist when the FISA law was changed after the Bushistas' illegal wiretapping over 2005-08. Instead of prosecuting the Bushistas, a compliant congress and the courts excused the transgressions and actually made them lawful!  Hence, whatever protections people think they have disappeared when the illegal variant of the FISA law was extended back in 2011.

We also know that it isn't necessary for NSA programs "to search the whole database" and that the Main Core will assemble suspicious words whether a human person searches or not.  This is also why the Occupy Wall Street protestors literally came under the gun.  Finally, even one of the original authors of the Patriot Act, Jim Sensenbrenner, insisted he never intended it to go as far as it has, and as Snowden revealed.  As he was quoted in a UK Guardian piece two months 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,"

Sensenbrenner was referring to NSA honcho James Clapper lying before a Senate hearing  months earlier, when asked if the NSA did mass surveillance. So if Clapper was lying, it is obvious that Samuelson must be too by his specious defense of the NSA - and that those poor little souls aren't doing anything beyond the limits of Sec. 215 at all.  Oh no, so just rest your little heads! All is well!

Is Samuelson calling Sensenbrenner a liar?  If the original author of the Patriot Act believes the NSA overstepped the bounds of the law who the fuck is Samuelson to claim anything different?

Oh wait, he's a Neoliberal hack!

Next time you see anything from Robert Samuelson and wonder if it has some veracity, consider the source. Would you drink water from a sewer ditch? Of course not, so why take anything from Samuelson as useful information you can trust?

See also (from someone you can trust):

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/53531/exposing-public-wickedness-is-more-american-than-apple-pie

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

No American Ought to be Complacent About NSA Mass Spying - Even with Gov't Shutdown

"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.” - Sen. Frank Church, referencing the NSA in 1975.

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

According to assorted complaints from the NSA head spooks, including James Clapper and others, NSA hasn't been able to adhere to their full mass-spying mandate on account of the government shutdown. And so, we keep hearing the same complaints trotted out that we heard after Ed Snowden exposed this indiscriminate spying: "We're not able to protect Americans as long as this goes on". Of course, this doesn't even pass a basic laugh test. A number of former NSA people have made it clear this extreme 'haystack' approach - trying to find one "needle" to keep all of us safe - is pure bollocks.

Now, as reported in the UK Guardian we learn that the author of the Patriot Act, James Sensenbrenner, is up in arms and outraged at how NSA expanded the language in the original act to expand the FISA basis for searches. This conservative Republican who co-authored the Patriot Act is preparing to unveil bipartisan legislation that would dramatically curtail the domestic surveillance powers it gives to intelligence agencies.


Sensenbrenner's imminent bill in the House of Representatives is expected to be matched by a similar proposal from Senate judiciary committee chair Patrick Leahy, a Democrat. It pulls together existing congressional efforts to reform the National Security Agency in the wake of disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden. So again, we must honor and offer kudos for Snowden for exposing this - else we'd never have known about it - and nothing would have been done. So yeah, Snowden deserved the "Integrity in Intelligence" award he just received - probably the only one in government who deserves it.


Certainly Clapper doesn't! According to the Guardian, Sensenbrenner isn't taking Clapper's earlier lies lightly. He's  called for the prosecution of Obama's director of national intelligence,  who admitted misleading the Senate intelligence committee about the extent of bulk collection of telephone records.   According to Mr. Sensenbrenner:

"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,"


Certainly, if Obama had any balls at all, he ought to have fired Clapper on the spot. But then, I don't know, since he never prosecuted the Bushites for their war crimes (including torture and launching an illegal pre-emptive war), or went after Wall Street's denizens the way he should have, perhaps he is simply lacking the intestinal fortitude to make the hard decisions. I may be wrong, but I am - truthfully - not sanguine about any upcoming deals he plans to make with Repukes to keep the gov't open.

Or maybe Obama is terrified of the pseudo-liberal twerp, Dianne Feinstein. The Guardian notes that while Clapper has apologized for the incident, NSA reformers expect a fierce backlash to their proposals to rein in his powers in future. Sensenbrenner again:

"I anticipate a big fight, and Senator Feinstein has already basically declared war. If they use a law like Senator Feinstein is proposing, it will just allow them to do business as usual with a little bit of a change in the optics."

Why should Feinstein "declare war"? Hell, her hubby is one of the NSA contractors doing the spying, as the Guardian disclosed months ago! So, obviously, she has a vested interest in keeping this thing going the way it is, not in changing it. Which is another reason she needs to be replaced on the Senate Intelligence Committee: conflict of interest.  Another thing that bugs me: Why have the lazy U.S. media not exposed this?


Meanwhile, Sensenbrenner's twin effort with Leahy to introduce legislation via the House and Senate judiciary committees is partly intended to circumvent such opposition among intelligence committee leaders.  But make no mistake, without a leash being put on Feinstein, it will be a brutal drawn out battle and there is no assured positive result. This is also why Americans can't allow themselves to become complacent but ought to be fax blasting or emailing their reps to get this thing done.


Fortunately, there is plenty of support among other intelligence committee members. Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, who were first to seize on Snowden's disclosures as a way to make public their longstanding concerns, recently teamed up with Republican Rand Paul and colleague Richard Blumenthal to propose similar reforms of the NSA in their own bill.

Still, ordinary Americans need to care and can't let their guard down by pabulum from the spooks. By now, most people are aware that the NSA collects massive amounts of information on ordinary Americans. NSA Chief Keith Alexander would tell you that the government must collect the entire haystack to find the needle. But what happens to the rest of the haystack – the information about law-abiding citizens that gets swept up under ever-expanding collection authorities?

You may not want to know. In theory according to one Guardian columnist, the agencies involved in mass spying are obligated to separate the "needles" from "haystacks". In practice? Not so much.  Americans' communications are supposed to be destroyed as soon as possible, but they can be kept for up to six years to see if they meet certain criteria, according to recently declassified guidelines (pdf). Metadata about nearly every phone call made within the United States, kept in another NSA storehouse, can be saved for five years.

You haven't seen the worst, and a recent New York Times report revealed that the NSA keeps a wide range of information about Americans' communications for up to five years in online databases and another ten years "offline for 'historical searches'".


In addition, many other government agencies retain information about innocent Americans, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice. Take the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As its mission transformed after 9/11 from crime-solving to terrorism prevention, the bureau dramatically expanded its legal authority to gather information about Americans with no basis for suspicion. At the same time, few if any additional restrictions were imposed on its powers to keep and share that information.

Today, an FBI agent can open an intrusive investigation with no reason to suspect criminal activity, and any resulting information can be kept for 20-30 years, even if it has no relationship to the investigation. Similarly, the FBI keeps so-called "suspicious activity reports" that are determined to have no relevance to terrorism – but may reflect Americans' constitutionally protected speech or other activities – for 30 years in a widely-accessible database.


Meanwhile, the National Counterterrorism Center, established in the years after 9/11 to serve as a central repository for terrorism-related information. The center issued guidelines last year allowing it to keep and search non-terrorism databases of Americans' information for up to five years, a ten-fold increase over the previous limit.

Why should we care that the government may keep and share information about us? If the government is only looking for terrorists, the vast majority of us surely have "nothing to hide".

But the government's broad sweep for information can land innocent Americans on watchlists from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate themselves. Furthermore, history teaches that the accumulation of personal information about law-abiding citizens carries tremendous potential for abuse – including harassment of minorities, political enemies, and social activists.

NO American ought to put up with such clear 4th amendment violations!

Sensenbrenner, meanwhile, has rightly fulminated at how NSA's spooks have expanded the original definitions beyond their intended bounds. He told The Guardian:


"We had thought that the 2006 amendment, by putting the word 'relevant' in, was narrowing what the NSA could collect. Instead, the NSA convinced the Fisa court that the relevance clause was an expansive rather than contractive standard, and that's what brought about the metadata collection, which amounts to trillions of phone calls."


While the dissemblers in NSA and elsewhere have pointed to this 4th amendment- violating approach as the only way to reliably get data and "keep us safe". Sensebrenner, however,  claimed that NSA director general Keith Alexander only pointed to 13 possible suspicious individuals found through this method during his recent Senate testimony. According to Sensenbrenner.


"The haystack approach missed the Boston marathon bombing, and that was after the Russians told us the Tsarnaev brothers were bad guys,"


Make no mistake that none of this is tolerable. No American ought to turn a blind eye if he or she in any way embraces the Constitution.  More fundamentally, we ought to appreciate that keeping information about ordinary Americans "just in case" upends the traditional relationship between a democracy and its people. It effectively establishes a presumption that citizens are potentially guilty until proven innocent, and that the government has the right – even the responsibility – to stockpile information that may eventually prove their guilt.

In other words, it paves the way to a totalitarian fascist state. Thanks to Snowden we may have averted this future, but an immense political battle remains - and no one ought to relax their guard until our government is returned to its normal respect for our Constitutional protections.

 

We Must Get the "Patriot Act" Repealed in 2015!

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” – Samuel Johnson

“No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare.”- – Barack Obama, May 23^rd, 2013

"The fundamental reason for the conversion of the state into a gigantic spy apparatus is the nature of deeply destructive domestic and foreign policies which the government has so forcefully pursued. The vast expansion of the police state apparatus is not a response to the terror attack of 9/11. The geometrical growth of spies, secret police budgets, and the vast intrusion into all citizen communications coincides with the wars across the globe. The decisions to militarize US global policy requires vast budgetary re-allocation , slashing social spending to fund empire-building. 

Mass spying is designed to identify the citizens who oppose both imperial wars and the destruction of domestic welfare.”       – James Petras

"People in the U.S. are indoctrinated from birth with the idea that it's the government's job to protect their freedom. That the U.S. is a special place where we have nothing to fear because democracy will keep us free. What they should be taught is that government, no matter what the form, is always (always!) the biggest threat to freedom and that it is up to public at large to throw their butts out when they violate the public trust_"– Commenter on UK Guardian forum, July 17, 2013

“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged” –  Cardinal Richelieu


The mis-named "Patriot Act" comes up again for review in 2015. When it does, it's time for alert and aware citizens to pressure their congress critters to slay this misbegotten beast once and for all - don't let even one section arrive for "re-approval" which might feed more gov't paranoia against its citizens. If you think in the most remote sense I am "inflating"  things or exaggerating, then you need to watch Josh Fox's "Gasland II" and how ordinary citizens who protest the destruction of their air and water (via fracking)  have now even become "enemies of the state". And how former Homeland Security Head Tom Ridge has become part of a Marcellus Shale "security"  contingent that now employs "counter insurgency" measures on the disaffected citizens of Pennsylvania, and PSYSops methods developed by the U.S. Army while basically labeling them as "terrorist threats".

After one couple saw their medical bills inflated, in the wake of their water and air poisoned and their kid with bleeding nose and other sores, we had to halt the program. Janice, my wife, was in tears and near apoplectic hysteria - she simply couldn't take it any more. (We hope to resume with Part 2 of Gasland II when she "can summon the courage".) But summon the courage you must, fellow citizens, because it was obvious from even watching half this documentary the war is on the citizens and their welfare,  compliments of a depraved corporate gangster state- metastasizing perhaps since the JFK assassination. A gangster state that bails out banksters, allows war criminals like the torturing Bushites and their corporate minions off, but leaves rank and file citizens exposed to every nefarious means of under cutting their lives, including now - tracking all license plates on vehicles and their locations, then storing them (according to an ACLU report).

Anyway, I digress. The Congressional investigative hearings are now focussed on the over reach of the NSA surveillance that Ed Snowden disclosed.  Testifying yesterday before the House Judiciary Committee, John C. Inglis - the deputy director of the NSA, admitted that NSA analysts can "perform a second or third hop query" through its amassed telephone or internet records, "to find connections to terrorist organizations"

In other words, my friends, you needn't even be talking to a friend of a "terrorist" (who now may even be an activist protesting against the filthy water on offer after the gas frackers crapped on people in rural PA). It may be only an acquaintance of an acquaintance of that person! And from the NSA logs, those connections then makes YOU part of the web of suspicions!  Anyone here recall the Stasi? The Gestapo?

Meanwhile, two days earlier top spook Keith B. Alexander was asked about the extent of collection, to what degree? According to the WaShPost, Alexander took a "collect it all surveillance approach originally directed at Iraqis in the middle of a (bogus) war, and thereafter transferred it so that it is now directed at the US domestic population as well as the global one"


The Post went on:

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


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

In other words, just as the entire Iraqi populace became the "enemy" so have ordinary U.S citizens who didn't do a goddamned thing!  The Post author continues:

"Aside from how obviously menacing and even creepy it is to have a state collect all forms of human communication - to have the explicit policy that literally no electronic communication can ever be free of US collection and monitoring - there's no legal authority for the NSA to do this"

Meanwhile, in the House hearings yesterday, the actual author of the Patriot Act, James Sensenbrenner, warned officials that unless they reined in the scope of their surveillance, they'd risk lacking the votes to renew the provisions. My argument is the entire act ought to be trashed, then only parts renewed and only after EVERY manjack has read its provisions carefully! (Let's recall that after Snowden broke the news on this PRISM crap, Sensenbrenner was quoted as saying when he wrote the Section (215) he never ever intended such wide, dragnet surveillance.)

Well duh! Let us now be aware that the Patriot Act itself has not only been responsible for this misbegotten spread of surveillance, but also the militarization of police forces across the nation (what many call the "Swat-ization"), as well as the paranoid reaction by the spy state to many historically ordinary citizen actions, such as conducting legal protests (as Occupy Wall Street did) and complaining to the media about the despoiling of air and water - as the residents of Pennsylvania's rural Marcellus Shale drilling regions have done.  In other words, the Act has single handedly been responsible for the expansion of the "terrorist" meme while also feeding gov't paranoia to justify any technology to spread further suveillance - even now to tracking drivers and their driving locations!

We are now the enemy, the perceived collective  "enemy of the state", and if we don't get this horrific Act repealed or fully rewritten we will pay for it years to come, as the "good Germans" did after the Reich steamrolled all their Weimar democracy liberties to smithereens. Perhaps John Conyers' comment was the most direct and on the mark of all, when he told Inglis, James Cole (deputy Atty. General)  and Robert Litt ( the senior legal counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence ) that what NSA  had done with its PRISM was clearly "a violation of the law"  in the matter of transgressing 4th amendment rights. Let us recall again what that amendment states:

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.

Lastly, we need to remember we wouldn't even be having this conversation were it not for Snowden's whistle-blowing.

And newsflash to pundit Melissa Harris Perry (who said on her MSNBC show,  “the whole point of civil disobedience” is “to show that you are willing to risk your own freedom, your own body, in order to bring attention to something that needs to be known.”) Well, Snowden did just that. And no, Melissa, he doesn't have to turn into a total masochist to prove that - allow himself to be taken to a U.S. Gulag, stripped and waterboarded 24/7 and experience what others may or may not have. He basically gave up a comfortable life, earning nearly $200k year with a great pad in Hawaii and a beautiful gf. If that's not a sacrifice I don't know what the fuck is.  Besides, what have YOU sacrificed? Evidently nothing, as you won't even speak on his behalf  (in terms of revealing what the gov't has done ) like Chris Hayes has.

The spooks and their defenders and enablers like Lisle, Clapper and Alexander (and much of the media)  can talk all the codswallop they want that their intrusions are "only limited" or they can't really tell who is doing what, or that Snowden is a "traitor" - but the intelligent citizen knows better. And no, WE are not "paranoid" - it's the government that's paranoid else it wouldn't need to scoop up every bit of info under the Sun about us!

See also:

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/18/rebecca_solnit_edward_snowden_is_a_modern_day_prometheus_partner/