Will Obama Rein in the NSA - Or Wimp Out?

Not very long from now President Barack Obama will give a speech and let us know to what extent he plans to rein in the excesses of the out-of-control,' stomp on the Constitution' NSA.  This comes one day after the latest revelations, namely of the NSA scarfing up 200 million text messages every day, in untargeted global sweeps. See, e.g.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/16/nsa-collects-millions-text-messages-daily-untargeted-global-sweep

 This means they aren't particularly concerned whether you're a terrorist or not they just want the collected data and have it filed away. Maybe because you might be found to be an "enemy of the state" - later, i.e. after protesting a fracking well, or contaminated water from one.

 

The issue is how far Obama will go to rope in these snoops  given they've already violated the 4th amendment almost every way one can conceive. Just google: PRISM, Xkeyscore, and MUSCULAR.

 

Recall what brought us to this point. After Edward Snowden released files exposing the extent of NSA overreach, Obama appointed a commission of security experts to look into the  NSA excesses and propose solutions.  The commission issued a nearly 300-page report in December, making 46 recommendations to rein in the most excessive and offensive  programs, including PRISM and Xkeyscore. In addition, the panel advised that the NSA be banned from attempting to undermine the security of the internet – concerns pounded by tech companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo) when their top executives met with Obama on the first Monday last month. All the executives expressed the fear that their respective business models and market shares were being undermined by the NSA dragnet surveillance,  which meant fewer buyers and customers for their systems.

Regarding Edward Snowden, NSA honcho James Clapper called his brave act ‘treason’ but it then came out that Clapper had lied before a Senate Intelligence Committee months before Snowden's first document release. When asked if the NSA did mass surveillance, Clapper responded in the negative then tried to "cute it up" by saying it was the "least untruthful  answer" he was able to provide.  This is what prompted Patriot Act co-author Jim Sensenbrenner  to say:

 

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.     

Meanwhile, the Neoliberal media and politicos, the ones cozy with the security state, condemned him as a “traitor” – which is nonsense. As Article IV of the Nuremberg laws makes clear, the citizen has a much higher duty to his conscience than following orders  or oaths that violate a Constitution or basic morality.  And there’s no issue that Snowden did the right thing when one reads the timeless words of the fourth amendment to the Bill of Rights:

 

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

 

If one reads it slowly and carefully, especially the underscored sections, the magnitude of Snowden’s heroic deed becomes clear. Clearly the NSA’s mass vacuuming up of data violates the amendment.  “Secure in one’s person” can obviously only mean as pertains to an individual. You cannot have a collective or whole population that is secure in its person!  If the inherent right to privacy enshrined in this amendment was purely a “myth” – such as those like Dick Cheney and Dianne Feinstein have implied by their actions- then security as to particular papers, persons, effects wouldn’t matter. The state can then claim de facto ownership of whatever a person has – nothing could be claimed apart from the state – and so the person emerges as merely an appendage. In this proto-fascist world, security trumps liberty at every juncture and the state uses the bogey of fear (e.g. terror attacks)  to reinforce and expand that control.

 

Thus, the documents leaked by Snowden compelled attention because they revealed to Americans a history they did not know they had. They revealed that the state had vastly more power than the citizen because it could – based on a claim of “terror” – usurp the citizen's  rights to his own privacy, i.e.  in his papers and effects, and do so secretly. They showed the NSA could collect with impunity all the email address books on the planet, as well as cell phone location records, the cell phone messages of other leaders, and domestic call logs and browsing histories.

 

 

In addition, more and more politicos and even media began to back off after more of the disclosures revealed the pernicious extent of the NSA's overstepping.  Most of that data, by definition and intent, belonged to ordinary people suspected of nothing. But vast new storage capacity and processing tools enabled the NSA to indiscriminately snatch the information to map human relationships on a planetary scale. Only in this way, its leadership believed, could the NSA reach beyond its universe of known intelligence targets.  In other words, by analogy, it was similar to a home owner using a machine gun to get rid of a wasp’s nest.

 

Meanwhile, the only words Obama had spoken had been in defense of  NSA and the entrenched security state and against Snowden, expressing in one cabinet meeting that he felt Snowden acted out of "narcissism" and averring in a news conference, that “Mr. Snowden is not really a patriot.”    The sad thing is that this issued from the mouth of a former constitutional law professor!  It also made the objective observer wonder if the guy that once openly spoke against such secrecy and  Patriot Act excesses (as a U.S. senator) had since become a captive to the system. 

 

On the other hand, it's possible Obama was played by the security statists after his 2008 election. According to a NY Times piece yesterday, Obama was told before his inauguration of a supposed plot by Somali extremists to attack the ceremony.. David Axelrod, his long time adviser, called this "a welcome to the NBA moment before the big game". As it turned out the report proved unfounded but it did have the intended effect of  reinforcing in Obama the "need to detect threats before they materialized".  This, of course, makes it even more suspicious- especially to a person familiar with deep politics (see also Peter Dale Scott's 'The War Conspiracy').

 

Obviously, the card played by the security statists made a deep impression on Obama, which civil libertarians learned when they confronted him last month about the NSA overreach. Obama simply replied he was now "Commander-in -chief" and he had a "different role to play, to protect the American people". This despite the fact the odds of any given American being killed in a terror attack are actually less than 1 in 346,000 or about the same as being killed by a monster asteroid. (See Gideon Rachman's Financial Times  analysis in my May 4, 2011 blog post).

 

Let's also grasp that decades earlier both Ike and JFK had been played by the national security state,  as I previously described in my November 4th blog post.  Both responded strongly after they'd been played by trying to reel in the CIA via limits and investigative actions, and both paid dearly. Ike saw his upcoming 1960 summit sabotaged by the Gary Powers U-2 incident, engineered by CIA head Richard Bissell, while JFK saw a coup and assassination (of the Diems) in Vietnam after the CIA pulled the plug on the Commodity Import Aid Program - assuring a coup. Of course, by then (Nov. 2, 1963) Kennedy was already in the sights of the CIA and its allies, given he'd "exceeded his mandate to wield power".

 

 

Obama now has the chance to negate all those perceptions by a stout defense of the fourth amendment and citizens' rights, based on how many of his commission's 46 recommendations are accepted.   This is not merely a matter of respecting citizens' rights in the present but acting in a precautionary manner to preserve them in the future.

 

As Richard A. Clarke, a member of Obama's commission and former White House counter terrorism adviser put it:

 

"We’re not really concerned about you, Barack, but God forbid some other guy’s in the office five years from now and there’s another 9/11,’ ”

 

 

This is germane and important. Just because Obama isn't tempted to 'go the whole hog' and use the in- place NSA files, programs to round up citizens under quaint "sedition" laws, or as domestic terrorists (say for protesting fracking wells) doesn't mean a future Reepig Prez wouldn't do it, say like a Ted Cruz, or a Chris Christiie (who's already shown his vindictive side by shutting down 3 lanes of 4 on the George Washington Bridge for a Dem-governed township (Fort Lee)  in NJ - despite the fact only Rachel Maddow has been able to figure out he's a lying slimeball).

 

Anyway, we await Obama's speech on the NSA issues, and hope like hell he isn't too timid in laying them out, and isn't tempted to split too many differences - translating into cosmetic changes only.

See also:  http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/marjorie-cohn/53677/nsa-metadata-collection-fourth-amendment-violation

 

Edward Snowden Was Right to Crow!

As the embedded Neolib hacks and security statists screech in 'hair on fire' form about Edward Snowden's recent WaPo interview (2 days ago) and  his declaring "I have already won", let us bear in mind that he really has - never mind what the Constitutional traitors claim (including that he must return and face prosecution for his "crimes".) No,  he committed no crimes, what he did was to EXPOSE crimes committed by a national security state on combined crack, steroids and PCP!

Judge Richard Leon, in a 68 -page ruling issued in Washington last Monday, vindicated Snowden by arguing that the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency is likely to violate the US constitution,  Judge Leon also 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.

This remark alone shows Snowden is not the villain the Neolib traitors make him out to be but a fuckin' HERO!  Now, add to that - if that wasn't enough -  the issuance of  a  300-page report  by a commission appointed by Obama himself - not any screwball, terror loving commie symps. The report 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.

Again, does anyone seriously believe we'd even be having this conversation, or know one damned thing about the NSA's run amuck global mass surveillance - extending to the Israeli PM, the German Chancellor as well as charitable aid workers working abroad - had Snowden not performed his constitutional duty and exposed these rats? Think about that!  As even Obama himself proclaimed:

"Just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you should!"

Well, fuckin' DUH! Of course not! The problem with the NSA and its troglodytes is they think that because they have the techno tools to spy into every nook and cranny of the world, they are mandated to do it, 'cause otherwise them 'thar terrorists win! Which is utter horse pockey.  You can't use the terrorist bogeyman as an all encompassing excuse to rob people of their rights. Besides which, the odds of any such attack are slim and none.   Gideon Rachman in a Financial Times piece two years ago, i.e.
observed that the number of Americans killed by terrorists since 1960 is "about the same as the number killed over the same period in deer accidents".

 He also  showed "the average American had only a one in 500,000 chance of being killed in a terrorist attack".  By way of comparison, the chance of dying in an airline crash is one in 346,000 and the chance of being annihilated by a large asteroid (> 0.5 km dia.) in its collision with Earth, is the same, according to Sir Martin Rees ('Our Final Hour').  In other words, we're pouring  tens of BILLIONS each year into bullshit to protect us from a bogeyman while these fuckers rip our rights away! Then add to that Rachel Maddow's analysis (2 yrs. ago)  that disclosed bin Laden's strategy was always to bankrupt us into spending insanity i.e.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/05/rachel-maddows-analysis-terrifying.html

So, Snowden was spot on,  and before anyone cites any "oaths" he took,  let us remind people his oath to the Constitution comes first. Even during the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, the Nazi scum were reminded that they had a higher duty to their consciences over and above any "oaths" taken to Hitler or the Reich laws. (This later became part of the Nuremberg Laws.)

Snowden put it supremely well in his WaPo interview:

“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”

Let's also bear in mind it was Clapper who lied before a Senate hearing months before Snowden's leaks, telling everyone - in response to a direct and specific question - there was "no mass eollection of data". So how can we trust this scumball at all?

Snowden noted that those who accuse him of disloyalty, mistake his purpose. He said:

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA, I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

When he was asked who elected him to take on any responsibility he was blunt:

“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions( in committee hearings). Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

Contrary to the NSA's denials and lies,  Snowden,  beginning in October 2012, brought his misgivings to two superiors in the NSA’s Technology Directorate and two more in the NSA Threat Operations Center’s regional base in Hawaii. For each of them, and 15 other co-workers, Snowden said he opened a data query tool called BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, which used color-coded “heat maps” to depict the volume of data ingested by NSA taps.

His colleagues were often “astonished to learn we are collecting more in the United States on Americans than we are on Russians in Russia,”

Snowden elaborated:

“I asked these people, ‘What do you think the public would do if this was on the front page?’ ”

He noted that critics have accused him of bypassing internal channels of dissent. “How is that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?”

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines sent a prepared statement to The Post declaring there was no evidence that supported Snowden's contentions about going to higher ups. But WHY would there be? Is she daft enough to believe that the superiors Snowden went to would write up notes about it and file them? Or leave in place any scintilla of a computer file? What planet is she living on? Obviously, to preserve plausible deniability (and their jobs) - and especially if they even remotely suspected Snowden might act on matters himself -  they'd shut the fuck up and also ensure no paper trails existed. Hell, that's basic Spookery 101!

Before anyone castigates Snowden let's also recall how his disclosure of the NSA's  MUSCULAR project enraged and galvanized U.S. technology executives (who went to see Obama last Monday and demanded changes). They believed the NSA had lawful access to their front doors — and had broken down the back doors anyway.

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith took to his company’s blog and called the NSA an “advanced persistent threat” — the worst of all fighting words in U.S. cybersecurity circles, generally reserved for Chinese state-sponsored hackers and sophisticated criminal enterprises. In other words, Smith portrayed our own spooks as the ENEMY.  They are, in his blog portrayal, the enemy within.

 

So in so many way, on so many levels, yes Snowden has already won. (In any case, I take his statement to be a direct snub of TIME in not choosing him as 'Person of the Year' as I wrote on in a previous blog post. As charismatic and decent a man as Pope Francis is, he simply didn't have the effect on global events that Snowden has.)

 

 

 
Most gratifying in Snowden's interview is how he bears no malice toward his peeved asshole detractors In the hope of keeping focus on the NSA, Snowden has ignored attacks on himself. He stated:

“Let them say what they want. It’s not about me.”

 

For example, former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden predicted that Snowden will waste away in Moscow as an alcoholic, "like other defectors.” To this, Snowden shrugged. He does not drink at all. Never has., he said.  In any case, whatever small tribulations Snowden has to endure in Russia are nothing compared to the despicable spectacle he'd face (in a military, Kangaroo-rigged court) if he ever returned to the U.S. He'd also likely be found guilty and suffer an even worse fate than Bradley Manning. They'd probably keep him naked in a solitary cell, fed only bread & water,  and water-boarded every 6 hours-   so enraged they'd be at how he exposed the underbelly of the national security state. (Which recall had no compunctions about blowing JFK's brains out on a Dallas' street.)

 

We all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude and those who say otherwise have no business calling themselves patriots or Americans. They belong to the same class of vermin as Joseph Goebbels, Herman Goering, and the other Nazi scum who used (via the Gestapo) their own extensive methods to grab up power more than 70 years ago.