NSA Honcho Keith Alexander Bloviates on '60 Minutes' - But Few Are Impressed

Alexander in his ridiculous 'dress blues' for a TV Interview

The dog and pony show that CBS put out on Sunday night, featuring  Keith B. Alexander in his dress blues, was absolutely pathetic. Pathetic first because it accomplished nothing in terms of converting anyone of sense to the belief the NSA mass surveillance is needed, and second because Alexander had to 'dude' it up to try to make the case.

Incredibly, the general felt the need to wear his dress blues to the interview. Dress blues are the most formal versions of military uniforms, normally worn for special occasions like state dinners, academy graduations, various formal receptions, funerals of high-status military and political figures, etc. NOT 60 Minutes. So why do it? Because he sought to project the patina of military authority to try to confer gravitas on the softball questions asked by  "reporter," John Miller , an NSA homer if ever there was one. (Miller's never made any bones about having long standing ties to the Agency)

But Alexander's blather about the need not to change anything about the way the NSA grabs up data is particularly outrageous, especially in the wake of a  300-page report  released two days after Alexander's performance. The report, prepared by a commission appointed by Obama, made 46 recommendations including that the NSA be stripped of its power to collect phone records in bulk.  In addition, the panel advised that the NSA be banned from attempting to undermine the security of the internet- themes pounded by tech companies when they met with Obama on Monday.

True, the report is far less sweeping than many of us would have liked, but the fact it comes on the heels of the tech companies pressure (they're losing market share because of the NSA hijinks and 4th amendment violations) ought to warm the cockles of a civil libertarian's heart.  The firms warned Obama that failure to rebuild public trust in communications privacy could damage the US economy.

Then there was  the ruling of a federal court judge that the spying is unconstitutional. Taken together there is cause to rejoice. It means Obama, like it or not, will be under immense pressure to ratify the sweeping changes. It also means Obama's usual game of "splitting differences" (which he honed to perfection in the Illinois state senate)is likely to be a loser, and not accepted. Obama really has only two choices when he reaches his decision next month: 1) Accept all the recommendations in the report and show us that as a former constitutional law professor he respects the will of the people and the country, OR, 2) cop to the NSA's demands and make only cosmetic changes - if any at all - showing he's a puppet of the national security state. Which, let us recall, is not a unique position for a President to be in, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/ike-jfk-also-hostage-to-national.html


The next best option for Obama? Grant amnesty for Edward Snowden for having the balls to reveal how badly fucked we are with a nascent security state that threatens to rival the Stasi and Gestapo unless checked. Alexander, for his part, asserts this can't be done because....hey...if Snowden gets off Scott-free, others might then leak too....

To which I say, Bravo!   We need more leakers, not fewer!


We need to know more of what the government is up to, than it knows about us. The reverse is the basis for tyranny.

Edward Snowden Vindicated by Judge's Ruling That NSA Dragnet Program is Unconstitutional

"I have little doubt the author of our Constitution, James Madison,  would be aghast"

"The government does not cite a single instance where the program actually stopped an imminent attack"

 - Federal Circuit Judge Richard Leon ruling against NSA super dragnet spying yesterday.

Richard Leon is another hero and defender of the Constitution irrespective of whether or not his momentous ruling on the NSA monster spy programs are overturned on appeal. We know it only takes one voice, even in the minority, to espouse truth and constitutional principles even if liars, reprobates and traitors are arrayed against them - to the extent of re-doing earlier laws (like the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) to render the illegal, legal.

Judge Leon, in a 68 -page ruling issued in Washington on Monday, argued that the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency is likely to violate the US constitution, in the most significant legal setback for the agency since the publication of the first surveillance disclosures by whistleblower  and constitutional hero, Edward Snowden.

Judge Leon declared that the mass collection of metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and was "almost Orwellian" in its scope. In a judgment replete with literary swipes against the NSA, he said James Madison, the architect of the US constitution, would be "aghast" at the scope of the agency’s collection of Americans' communications data.

You have nailed it, Judge Leon, and I already noted this in many previous posts. The 4th amendment is VERY clear that specific warrants must be issued, not mass warrants! I don't give a fuck how "inconvenient" it is or how long and arduous that process might be. Tough shit! Either adhere to the principles or admit you're traitors to your constitutional oaths. People can read the words of the Fourth for themselves below:

“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.”

Read it slowly and carefully, especially the emphasized portions over again. Clearly, the NSA MASS-grabbing of data violates directly the 4th amendment, and yeah, I'm as much a stickler about the 4th as the gun people are about the 2nd.

As I noted before, "secure in one’s person, house, papers, effects” implies PRIVACY! These are after all MY private papers, my private effects, my house, etc. If an inherent right to privacy was a myth then by all accounts being secure in one’s person, papers, effects wouldn’t matter. Hell, let the whole freakin’ world see ‘em! This is why in a fascist dictatorship “personal effects” don’t exist. “Personal papers” has no meaning. The state has full monopoly, de facto ownership on whatever the person has, even his own body. Hence, in fascist dictatorships, such as existed in Nazi Germany, all personal effects, papers could be seized by the Nazis on a whim or remote suspicion - under the Reich Laws. A fundamental right to privacy, meanwhile, insists there exist bona fide entities that one can uniquely own, e.g. papers, effects – including photos or what not- that are private. Without this fundamental right, then, “personal papers, effects” has no meaning hence the 4th amendment is meaningless.

It is clear to me that Judge Leon recognizes this, even if neoliberal coward and administration mouthpiece Jay Carney (calling for Snowden's return and prosecution) doesn't. Will Carney ever pull his head out of his ass? Probably never!

But what do you expect from Carney? The ruling, by the US district court for the District of Columbia, is a blow to the Obama administration, and sets up a legal battle that will drag on for months, almost certainly destined to end up in the Supreme Court. It was welcomed by campaigners pressing to rein in the NSA, and by Snowden, who issued a rare public statement saying it had vindicated his disclosures. It is also likely to influence other legal challenges to the NSA, currently working their way through federal courts.

Judge Leon expressed doubt about the central rationale for the program cited by the NSA: that it is necessary for preventing terrorist attacks. “The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack".

Leon added:

“Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation – most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics – I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism.”

If such instances  of actual success - based specifically on the dragnet programs - are not cited, then obviously we can't ascertain if the protection of the program is all based on some BS smokescreen  or not. Telling us that to provide the information would "risk national security" is horse patootey and insults our intelligence. It also gives cover to the spooks to do whatever the hell they want.

Leon’s opinion also contained stern and repeated warnings that he was inclined to rule that the metadata collection performed by the NSA – and defended vigorously by the NSA director Keith Alexander on CBS on Sunday night – was unconstitutional. (Alexander, treating us all like untutored children or idiots insisted he saw no other way to do the collection other than by mass dragnet - as one cheeky Denver Post letter writer put it, he could as well "put us all in prison then he can see and hear what we're doing and when any time he wants.")

Leon added:

“Plaintiffs have a substantial likelihood of showing that their privacy interests outweigh the government’s interest in collecting and analysing bulk telephony metadata and therefore the NSA’s bulk collection program is indeed an unreasonable search under the fourth amendment,”

Leon also said that the mass collection of phone metadata, revealed by the Guardian in June, was "indiscriminate" and "arbitrary" in its scope.  He also wrote:

"The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979,"

Referring to the year in which the US Supreme Court ruled on a fourth amendment case upon which the NSA now relies to justify the bulk records program. But he also implied that the later revision of that law was the main outrage: since it was done after the Bushies perpetrated warrantless wiretaps after 2005.  The pusillanimous punk traitor congress- instead of holding Bush to account and impeaching his sorry ass - let him get away with it by changing the 1978 FISA law to make mass warrantless wiretapping legal. It is amazing how few know about this and that all appeals to the later revised "law" are bogus.

Meanwhile, in a statement released subsequent to the ruling (related to Glenn Greenwald), Snowden said:

“I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts. Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many.”

We can only hope and trust this is the case, and that if and when it ends up at the Supreme Court they will perform their constitutional duty irrespective of their ideology.

Lastly, I was delighted to see Colorado Senator Mark Udall, a leading critic of the dragnet collection, welcomed the judgment.  In his words:

"The ruling underscores what I have argued for years: [that] the bulk collection of Americans' phone records conflicts with Americans' privacy rights under the US constitution and has failed to make us safer,"


Maybe one of these days, Mr. Obama - a  constitutional scholar at one time - will begin to see that.

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

Protecting Your Data And Files From the NSA Snoops

Now that the word is out that the NSA plans to try to shut down media outlets, and that likely includes certain blogs as well, people may wish to know how to muster some kind of defense against the indiscriminate mass spying – repeatedly justified as “necessary for our security” – but which any old spooker hack would use to try and frighten the weak-willed. But as Mother Jones (Nov.-Dec., p. 27) and other sources have reported, even Patriot Act co-author Jim Sensenbrenner was “Stunned at what the NSA had become.” The referenced article (‘Troll on the Hill’) is about how Republican Rep.Justin Amash tried his best (along with liberal Dem Rep John Conyers) to rein in these mutants – and he almost succeeded by the final vote, until the Obamanites brought heavy pressure to bear on any waverers.

Anyway, the latest news from the UK Guardian today is that the head of the embattled National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, is accusing journalists of "selling" his agency's documents” and is calling for an end to the steady stream of public disclosures of secrets "snatched" by former contractor Edward Snowden. In other words, this guy wants the media outlets shut down! Anyone recall how the Gestapo started doing the same shit in Germany before the Enabling Act? Probably not! Alexander reportedly complained on the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.

”I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 – whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn't make sense.

We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don't know how to do that. That's more of the courts and the policy-makers but, from my perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on,"

Jeebus, hasn’t this character been taught the First Amendment? Evidently no more than he was taught the 4th. This stuff is now in the public domain, sir, so basically you are trying to close the barn door after the cows escaped when it was left open – by your own contractors and their massive snooping apparatus!

As Mr. Greenwald added:

“There are 25,000 employees of the NSA (and many tens of thousands more who work for private contracts assigned to the agency). Maybe one of them can tell The General about this thing called "the first amendment".


Well, Glen, clearly they think a punk congress will put through another Enabling Act followed by a newer version of the old Reich laws – where the Nazis tossed German newspaper editors into camps for not keeping quiet. But you know, “he who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it”.

Anyway, let’s move on to how to protect your files from the snoopers, as delivered in an inset box within the same MJ article:

1) Use open source software. Sources with software publicly available are more secure than anything developed by Microsoft, Apple or Google. Open source platforms include Firefox for your browser and Thunderbird for your email,

2) Hide your location. This can be done by installing the easily downloadable Tor Browser, which is pre-configured to mask your IP address and therefore your location.

3) Encrypt: Yeah, we’ve known since last month that NSA’s spooks have defeated most commercially available encryption- but scrambling your online activities can still foil most hackers and snoops with too much time on their hands. The easily installable browser HTTPS everywhere encrypts your web activity. For email, use Pretty Good Privacy.

4) Mind the air gap: If you’re serious about being a modern day ‘Deep Throat’ (like the one that revealed the Watergate stuff to Woodward and Bernstein) build a computer that’s never been used so hasn’t been fucked up using backdoors by snoops. If you want to deliver a secure file to another, encrypt it first and physically deliver via USB stick.

5) Divorce Your Freakin’ Phone: In July, a federal appeals court ruled that the government can obtain your location from carriers without a warrant. Again, another 4th amendment violation. You can minimize what you share by disabling tracking functions on your apps, oh, and turning off your phone when not in use.

6) Use a pass phrase: A string of random common words, i.e. ‘jose lama tequila mountain’ is way easier to recall and way harder to crack than a single word. Because pass phrases are significantly longer than passwords they carry more bits of entropy so are more difficult to crack.

To see the entire presentation, ‘How to Lock Down Your Data’, go to the Mother Jones site or see p. 31 of the magazine.

Snowden Receives Award - His Take on NSA Mass Spying is Right On

"Mass spying is designed to identify the citizens who oppose both imperial wars and the destruction of domestic welfare.”       – James Petras
 
  For the first time since being granted asylum in Russia, Edward Snowden has emerged to receive the 'Sam Adams" award. No, it's not named after a popular beer, but after one of the nation's first whistleblower heroes. As such it is a noteworthy achievement, given our government has hounded this constitutional hero to the ends of the Earth while allowing real war criminals (hint, hint: Bush and Cheney et al) to walk free. Also present for the ceremony were former whistle blower heroes including: former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former NSA executive Thomas Andrews Drake and former FBI agent Coleen Rowley, Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, and Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks .


Snowden's appearance also included a spot- on speech, especially relevant given Gen. Keith B. Alexander's blabber in testimony a few days ago,  insisting the mass dragnet approach is essential and hey, "Americans just got riled up (by the Snowden disclosures) because they didn't know how the data was being used and its limits."  Horse shit!  What does this guy take us for, idiots? A number of former NSA folks have made it abundantly clear this doesn't even pass a laugh test.

For reference, former NSA code breaker Bill Binney commenting on June 19 CBS' Early Show, on Keith Alexander's NSA spying testimony and "breaking up plots", acidly observed:

"First of all 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”.

Wow! Sounds like  Gen. Alexander is talking codswallop, no matter how "intense" he delivered his "testimony.  In contrast, Snowden's award speech underscores Binney's take to a tee.  Snowden argued that the methods employed by the U.S. to tap into phone and internet connections areound the world actually make people less safe. In short video clips posted by the WikiLeaks website on Friday, Snowden said the NSA mass surveillance he revealed before fleeing to Russia ''puts us at risk of coming into conflict with our own government.''

This is heavy stuff. It means we've all been sold a bill of goods, almost as defective as the crap put out by the Warren Commission on JFK's assassination. (Which we, serious JFK assassination researchers, believe was done to protect the national security state.)  It also means, as noted in an earlier blog post, we're all regarded as potential enemies and hence - yes, indeed - are all "at risk of coming into conflict with our own government" if they choose to regard our expressed opinions as identical with those of enemies of state. In any case, the haystack-dragnet approach automatically assumes we're all bad guys ab initio. If not, there'd be essential discrimination of signal from noise as Binney advocated.

Note that Sen. Frank Church didn’t mince words, he used the phrase  "make tyranny total”  in reference to the NSA’s potential for harm – if not properly collared by the democratic process. He may well have been able to see ahead to the COG ('continuity of government' program) which under the Bushites  equated political dissent with treason. (Enabling us to know why the security state was so hot to trot to squelch all OWS protests, including beating the living shit out of them when they tried to approach Wall Street and the Stock Exchange!)

The Bushies' COG expanded the definition of "terrorist" to include "domestic terrorist", assisted by a traitorous congress in 2001, whereby:

"…activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States"


According to the ACLU, “this definition is broad enough to encompass the activities of…prominent activists, campaigns and organizations.”  That includes Occupy Wall Streeters and anyone who protests the Keystone XL pipeline!

Five years ago, investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham also disclosed the extent of the COGo's worst component:

"The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers


Ketcham went on:

“There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources note the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. 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.”

Those who want to read more on COG can go to:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/03/31/the-showdown/

So, we've no basis for being pacified or consoled by Keith Alexander's bollocks. We're more compelled to take Snowden's words seriously. He described NSA's approach as : ''dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under sort of an eye that sees everything even when it's not needed.''

This also means oversight errors are more likely to take place, such as failing to detect the Boston bombers. There is simply a surfeit of data, information which makes finding the terror 'needle' much more difficult if the data pool is thousands of time larger than it need be.  Snowden also went on to point out:

''They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships and to associate freely,''


Which is 100% spot on.  Why the hell should I attend a Xmas party with people I don't know if ONE of them might (on some offhand, remote chance) be a relative of a "terrorist" - which will then put me in the cross hairs of COG, or Main Core? Thus, awareness of the NSA's panopticon spy machine makes me less likely to seek out human connections, given one or more may already be on a Watch list, a former Keystone or OWS protestor or worse. Thus, it damages relationship potential - even for introverts.

Snowden's most apt remark was when he said the U.S. government was:

''unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country on camera, but they'll stop at nothing to persecute someone who told them the truth.''

He is, of course, referring to James Clapper who had the audacity to outright LIE before a Senate Committee.  This even roiled Patriot Act co-author James Sensenbrenner who agreed with Snowden's take as he was quoted in a UK Guardian piece:

"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. Maybe Michael Parenti is right that we have become a "gangster state" and it's been on that path  - indeed initiated - from the date Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Thus it shows how the country has mutated to become a corporatocratic war-security state. And nearly all accomplished via corporate lobbyist cash and campaign contributions, especially from defense contractors and the security hucksters.

Maybe what we need is a lot more Edward Snowdens to expose the other aspects of the corporate state we don't know.

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.

 

Linguistic 'Eggheads' Can Figure Out Who You Are From Your Tweets

Let me say first, I don't do 'tweets'. I have no Twitter account - though I did finally get a Facebook page I hardly ever go to- and intend to keep it that way. "Tweeting" (140 maximum characters sent at a time) is not my thing, and besides I have too many pressing projects ongoing (including revising several books, and finishing a science fiction novel) to be held hostage to tweets, reading them or responding. It's hard enough to keep up with emails!

Anyway, having said that, it appears a lot of eggheads in linguistics  have their focus on the Tweeter-ites, and according to a recent piece in TIME (Sept. 9, p. 56):

"are using the seven year old micro-blogging platform to put millions of tweets under the microscope in an instant".

According to one linguist, Ben Zimmer, at Vocabulary.com:

"It's unprecedented. The sheer amount of text you can look at at one time and the number of people you can analyze at once."

According to the linguists, tweets are a veritable goldmine into the profiles of tweeters, offering a treasure trove of data never seen before. Hidden in the tweets, or so they say, are insights into how people (at least those who tweet)  portray their identity in a few short sentences. Great! I can just see how delighted Gen. Keith Alexander of the NSA will be when he gets a hold of this data!

Maybe even more sinister, is how "campaign managers and advertisers" are taking note and fairly drooling at the prospect of "pulling signal out of the data" in order to better influence American or other brains to do the bidding of Madison Avenue or the Overclass manipulators.

Some of the finds so far from the tweet research:

- Women are more likely to use first person terms (like 'I' and 'my') and exclamation points, especially repeated ones.

- Females who tweet to  largely male audience are more likely to use features like numbers, associated with 'the boys'.

- Older tweeters tend to use emoticons with noses e.g. like :-) instead of :)  this is evidently tied to "their preference for conventional language"

- Youthful no 'nose' tweeters tend to use more swear words

- Younger tweeters are also more apt to type their words in all capitals and to use expressive lengthening, like: 'Niiiiiiiiiiice"'

- Older tweeters are more likely to include well wishing, like 'Take care', and 'Good morning'. They also tend to send longer tweets and use more prepositions.


Geography, income and race can also be discerned from tweets:

For example, the term 'suttin' (a variant of 'something') has been associated with Boston-area tweets.  Meanwhile, the acronym ikr ('I know, right?') is popular in the Detroit area.

Wealthy neighborhoods are more likely to use the word 'awesome', and emoticons often appear in tweets from areas with large Hispanic populations.

Linguists point out that while all this may seem frivolous, it provides insights into how people purposefully and unwittingly use words to signal who they are. According to one computational linguist from Georgia Tech, Tweet trends also "make it possible to guess the demographics of senders when no information is explicitly provided." This is a huge asset for any advertiser who intends to sell products on Twitter.

Other researchers at the Mitre Corporation came up with an algorithm that could determine the tweeter's sex 75% of the time, just using their tweets.

Another aspect that is being researched is the "diffusion of words"  or constructing "subway maps around the United States showing where words to tend to move." They've already found that race may matter as much as geography. A term coined in Jackson, MS, for example, may well turn up in Memphis (both places have high proportions of African-Americans) but not in Fairbanks, AK or Colorado Springs, CO.

Other researchers are mining tweets to discern how rumors and urban legends spread from person to person.

Linguists so far are delighted that "tweeters are generally oblivious to the possibility that their messages might be scrutinized" which is a "boon to researchers who want to analyze natural speech rather than edited text you find in the pages of a magazine, or in certain blogs (like Brane Space- with each post undergoing maybe 4-5 iterations of re-edits).

According to one linguist: "They don't feel like they are being observed by guys in white coats."

Hmmmm......maybe they should, as opposed to dumping ever more data into the data stream, sure to be used by advertisers and even the government (NSA) - say to match profiles into already existing databases such as Main Core - the database that can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.(See e.g http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/between-skeleton-key-and-cog-how-close.html )

Will the tweeters take note and be more cautious? Not likely!

Keith Alexander's Read The Constitution? Yeah, Right - And I've Seen Pigs Fly & Aliens Land!

At the so-called “Black Hat” (didn’t hear too many of them) Hacker convention in Las Vegas, in reply to some hecklers (“Read the Constitution!”) Gen. Keith B. Alexander insisted: “I did read it and so should you!”  At that point cheers erupted and one had to wonder what kind of crowd had really assembled as hackers – and how many were NSA plants. (Did the NSA scoop up emails indicating hecklers would appear? Hmmmm…..)

But the bottom line is that in light of the latest revelations on the NSA’s “XKeyscore” program – which according to files released by the UK Guardian:

  “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.”

If Alexander HAD read the Constitution as he claims, there’d definitely be NO XKeyscore! Thus, since he definitely missed the memo on the Fourth Amendment, I cite it here for his educational benefit:

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

Note here, Gen. Alexander, that “secure in ONE’S person, papers, house, effects” implies privacy first and is 180 degrees contrary to indiscriminate. mass scooping of data without SPECIFIC warrants, issued according to specific  NAMES from a proper FISA court  (which vanished after the 1978 FISA law was re-done to comply with the Bush lawbreakers – so don’t hand me any BS about what congress did or didn’t do).  All such specific warrants, because they are specific – pertaining to particular house, particular papers, etc. must be issued per person. It can’t be via a mass assembly,  techno-engineered  “gobble up” – done by volume and without naming specific persons or reasons, or as one Guardian commenter put it: “The NSA would have us believe that it is right for them to have all our private information on hand 'just in case' we turn out to be criminals or terrorists”

But “just in case,  to catch 'em later”-   doesn’t cut it (apart from the fact all citizens are to be presumed innocent under our so-called legal system)  The whole frickin’ idea of the 4^th amendment was to make it difficult for government to barge into citizens’  personal belongings, homes and papers, effects – knowing that this presented the very thing the colonists who launched the American Revolution were trying to get away from.  

This is also why in a fascist dictatorship,. “personal effects” or “personal papers” have no meaning. The state, via tyrannical laws (i.e. the Enabling Act and Reich Laws in Nazi Germany) declares it has monopoly powers over every and anything that conceivably can affect the state. The latest excuse (in Nazi Germany it was “Jews”) is “Terrorists”.. They are the new boogey men, like “commies’ were in the 50s-60s.

In this milieu of the faceless total security state,  the citizen can have no privacy in his papers, effects or home whatsoever, because in the mind of the totalitarian paranoid: “What might he or she be concealing that affects the security of the state?” In this guise the state trumpets “security” which supersedes individual privacy and civil rights. The state can then seize anything, any papers or assorted effects it deems problematic, on the mere suspicion that they might compromise the state’s total hegemony. The fact the state has the capacity (technologically)  to do such, is also interpreted by the state as a license and necessity to do it – to preserve “safety”. ("How can we possibly forego such technology in our hands? For 4th amendment rights? Y'er kidding!")

Without the fundamental right of privacy enshrined in the 4^th amendment, “personal papers, effects” have no meaning and  hence the 4th amendment is meaningless and I say by extension so is the entire constitution. It is clear to me from Alexander’s statement that he either regards the 4^th amendment as a quaint anachronism – inhibiting his NSA from their super scoop operations, OR he regards that section of the Constitution as inapplicable. But if he does, then by extension he must regard the whole Constitution as “just a piece of paper” – because none of the other fine statements, proclamations  mean a damned thing without the basic right to privacy enshrined in the 4^th amendment. What you have then is a kind of Potemkin constitution, a Potemkin nation and clearly, Potemkin Patriots.

Prof. Garry Wills has noted in his landmark book, A Necessary Evil-A History Of American Distrust Of Government, Simon & Schuster, 1999,', makes it abundantly clear why only the citizen has rights, not the government. He observes (p. 109):

“The Ninth Amendment talks of 'rights enumerated' and says 'the people' retain unenumerated ones. The rights in the Ninth are not the rights of the state, which can- strictly speaking - have no rights.


"Governments have prerogatives, people have rights - so Hamilton speaks of 'abridgments of prerogative' in the state to protect rights of citizens. What the Ninth says is that the rights enumerated as protected by The Constitution do not exhaust all rights inherent in a people. The states can retain powers, though not rights."

Hence, the term "state's rights" is bogus, in error. States (including the federal state) have prerogatives, not rights, because states exist as governmental entities not as persons-individuals.  It follows that the people then also have the unenumerated right to privacy. While said right isn’t specifically listed in the Constitution the Founders understood that as time went on new rights would emerge which they might not be able to think of (e.g. to health care). In terms of privacy, however, it is clear the language of the 4th amendment shows that privacy is presumed hence the Founders saw no need to elaborate it as a separate right.

We must conclude then that the the NSA, government mass surveillance as evidenced in PRISM and XKeyscore- with their de facto mass warrants (and specious courts that knee-jerk approved such), discloses a rejection not only of citizens’ fundamental right to privacy but any right to be secure in one’s person, papers, effects. So, screw the citizen, the gov’t has arrogated to itself the right to seize anything deemed personal or private once it’s within its purview – whether a phone record, an internet communication, email or whatever. And do it even in real time.

I think not only Gen. Alexander, but his entire outfit needs to read the Constitution again, particularly the Fourth Amendment (maybe write it all out 100 times as our elementary teachers made us do when we didn’t grasp a point.) Oh, and all those yahoos at the “Black Hat” Vegas convention that cheered at Alexander’s snarky riposte to the heckler? THEY need to do the same exercise!

 

See also the related Guardian story:

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data