Dianne Feinstein - A Certified Creep and Mass Surveillance Enabler

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

Is Dem Neoliberal Dianne Feinstein a defender of the Constitution? Hardly! She appears to be hell bent to disembowel all fourth amendment protections for Americans by pushing on congress a "FISA Improvements Act" which will, in fact, gut all remaining protections of privacy and basic rights for Americans - by legalizing a loophole known as the "backdoor search provision". I already went into some of this in previous blogs and the reasons why it's a terrible idea. Let's start out with the statement of the 4th amendment itself - which evidently Feinstein has no clue about:

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

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

What we conclude then is the NSA, government mass surveillance, mass warrants recently revealed, 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. The powers -that- be may really argue they’re doing this for our own good, but in reality they are acting the part of a fascist dictatorship in denying any right of privacy or recognition of individuality at all.  Note the reasons or their declared motivations for doing so are irrelevant.  The wise citizen who's kept up with events knows that "terrorism" is an exploited gimmick and shtick merely used to justify uncontrolled, unregulated surveillance.

As I wrote about earlier (Nov. 1) reasonable alternative legislation is available to steer the NSA in the proper direction. It is cosponsored by Democrat Patrick Leahy and Jim Sensenbrenner, a co-author of the Patriot Act.  Their bill is called the "USA Freedom Act", and to see more go to: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-31/usa-freedom-act-would-leash-the-national-security-agency

Recall Sensenbrenner agreed with Snowden's take on the damage done by this indiscriminate mass spy shtick - ditching individual warrants through the ruse of a bogus Fisa court (set up as legal only after the Bush warrantless searches) . As he was quoted in a UK Guardian piece three weeks 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,"

So, realizing the 4th amendment-protecting  Leahy-Sensenbrenner bill posed  a threat to her security bonanza, Feinstein set about neutralizing it with her own bill.  This would codify the ability of the National Security Agency to search its troves of foreign phone and email communications for Americans’ information, and permit law enforcement agencies to search the vast databases as well. In effect, it would both make permanent a loophole permitting the NSA to search for Americans’ identifying information without a warrant – and, formalize an ambiguity that might allow the FBI, the DEA and other law enforcement agencies to do the same thing.

In other words, it's surveillance on PCP plus crack. Multiplied "warrants" issued, all without proper cause, since such cause (under the 4th) must be attached to individual warrants. You simply cannot extract individual cause or guilt from mass, warrantless search. Once you cross that boundary you go over the precipice and become - if not already - a fascist surveillance state.  According to Michelle Richardson, the surveillance lobbyist for the ACLU:

"For the first time, the statute would explicitly allow the government to proactively search through the NSA data troves of information without a warrant.   It may also expand current practices by allowing law enforcement to directly access US person information that was nominally collected for foreign intelligence purposes. This fourth amendment back door needs to be closed, not written into stone.”

Section 6 of Feinstein’s bill blesses what her committee colleague Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and civil libertarian, has called the “backdoor search provision, which the Guardian revealed thanks to a leak by Edward Snowden.

This is serious shit. Are Americans paying attention, or are they  too tied up in their twitters, 'Survivor", Facebook or whatever?   Especially given that Feinstein’s bill passed the committee on an 11 to 4 vote on 31 October. An expanded report on its provisions released by the committee this week added details about the ability of both intelligence and law enforcement to sift through foreign communications databases that it accumulates under section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008. (This is the specious law that legalized ex post facto Bush's warrantless wiretaps. Rather than hauling the Bushies over the coals, our traitors in congress found it easier to legalize the misdeeds).

But maybe there is no way to halt it because all the congress critters - Senators voting for it are already co-opted and compromised.  Think I'm jesting? Look, if LBJ had enough on Chief Justice Earl Warren to blackmail him back in '64 -  by invoking J. Edgar Hoover's files  about a little adventure in Mexico City (Michael R. Beschloss, Taking Charge:The Johnson White House Tapes 1963-64, 1997, p. 72) what do you think a fully-loaded NSA -CIA has on ALL congress folk today?  Hesitate to vote on Feinstein's bogus law? Well, they  might be in the same predicament as Chief Justice Warren after he initially balked at serving on any Warren Commission, and LBJ cited Hoover's files to terrify him into compliance.

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


What we may be looking at, then, is a nation whose reps are no longer accountable to the people because all (or most) of them are compromised in some way by the national security state.  If the latter has enough goods on any of them, then how in hell can they vote their conscience? And if they can't exercise their conscience in a critical vote affecting all citizens, how can they be any more than controlled Zombots- whether by the NSA, Feinstein or whoever?

People also ought to be disturbed by the  ambiguity surrounding whether the FBI can currently search through the NSA’s foreign communications databases, or is reliant on the NSA to pass on information from the databases relevant to the bureau. A declassified Fisa court document from 2011 refers to “FBI minimization procedures,” but it is unclear what those procedures are. A copy of the FBI minimization procedures from 2009, acquired by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act is almost completely redacted.  So is the section in the government’s most recent report on its Section 702 collection dealing with the FBI’s role, though it contains references to how the FBI “receive[s] … unminimized Section 70 acquired communications” from the NSA.

Sadly, our votes may no longer count if -  once our chosen reps gain office-  their sundry pasts are revived by the NSA in assorted collected files and brought into sharp focus.  With one or more peccadilloes (or crimes) exposed, it's then a small matter to extract concessions on key legislation or total submission. In this case, we may be little different from Germany after the Enabling Act was passed.

World Wide Web Creator Blasts NSA For Undermining Online Security

You have to hand it to the spooks at NSA for being mischievous liars, dissemblers, prevaricators, obfuscators.....however you want to put it. And it's amazing how their crap works hand in glove with other spooks, from other nations. Case in point, the recent (TIME) comments of French Head Spook Bernard Squarcini, who deplored the "level of naïvete" of those condemning the NSA spying on allies when "we all do it". This, even as NSA Troglodyte James Clapper admitted in a Sunday NY Times interview ('No Morsel Too Minuscule for All -Consuming NSA', Nov. 1) that despite dismissing objections from other nations to NSA spying as "brazen hypocrisy":

There's no question that "from a capabiity standpoint (of the scale of eavesdropping of the NSA), we probably dwarf everybody on the planet with perhaps the exception of China and Russia"

Really now? Of course, he was referring - as the article noted - to the 35,000 workers and the $10.8 b a year which sets it apart for such dedicated international spookery. All money, imho, that is totally wasted. Money that could better be allocated to replacing the $40b to be cut from the food stamps program over the next 10 years - thanks to the security fetishist Reepos and assorted Demo Neoliberal punks in their camp. Just 4 years worth of NSA "allies' phones spymongering" would pay for that sliced SNAP program! It would mean the difference between kids in the "richest nation on Earth" going to bed hungry or not.

Anyway, now the creator of the World wide web has come out against the way this hyper, no holds barred spy craft is undermining the whole security of the web. According to a UK Guardian report, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who created the world wide web, has called for a "full and frank public debate" over internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ, warning that the system of checks and balances to oversee the agencies has failed. Make no mistake that as the inventor of the global system of inter-connectivity known as the web, with its now ubiquitous www and http, Berners-Lee is uniquely qualified to comment on the internet spying revealed by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In an interview with the Guardian, he expressed particular outrage that GCHQ and the NSA had weakened online security by cracking much of the online encryption on which hundreds of millions of users rely to guard data privacy. He said the agencies' decision to break the encryption software was appalling and foolish, as it directly contradicted efforts of the US and UK governments to fight cybercrime and cyberwarfare, which they have identified as a national security priority. Berners-Lee also said it was a betrayal of the technology industry. Let's recall, by way of fixing ideas here, how the NSA last year helped the Israelis create the 'Stuxnet' then 'Flame' virus - which escaped their control and (after being created as worms to destroy Iranian centrifuges for nuclear processing) and now lurks as a weapon that can be turned back on us all. (To get my take on it, see my post: 'The Stupidity of Stuxnet' from March 5, last year.)

Make no mistake that as a brilliant guy, Berners-Lee sees the Guardian news organization and Snowden as having acted in the public interest. This is in contrast to several senior British Puppets......errrrr....politicians – including the prime minister, David Cameron – who have called for The Guardian to be investigated over reporting of the Snowden leaks. Similar to the Neoliberal poseurs and puppets like Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein who loudly proclaimed Snowden a "traitor" and called for his prosecution, even as they turned a blind eye to the actual violations of the 4th amendment by using bogus Fisa courts to secure mass warrants as opposed to the individualized ones required by the 4th.

Berners -Lee went on to observe in his Guardian interview:

"Whistleblowers, and responsible media outlets that work with them, play an important role in society. We need powerful agencies to combat criminal activity online – but any powerful agency needs checks and balances and, based on recent revelations, it seems the current system of checks and balances has failed."

Sadly, the NSA has broken beyond all bounds of any useful or reasonable checks and balances. As the NY Times piece reported (op. cit., p. 11) the "exploits of the Tailored Access Operations, or T.A.O., is the prim name for the NSA division that breaks into computers around the world to steal the data inside, and sometimes leaves spy software behind." I mean, is it any wonder many citizens are flocking to the downloadable Tor browser (which is pre-configured to mask your IP address and therefore your location) with this shit going on and few legislators with the balls to impose some kind of control?

Today is to have been D-day when an unprecedented hearing in Westminster questions the conduct of Britain's spy agencies and the heads of the three secret services – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – go before parliament's intelligence and security committee. The 90-minute session will give the nine-strong committee, led by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a chance to question the agencies about the reach of the mass surveillance programmes that have provoked a global debate about privacy in the internet age.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., two parallel tracks for legislation - one bogus as a $3 bill, the other serious and real, are up for consideration. In the case of the former, the bill sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, would effectively legalize many of the NSA’s controversial spying tactics that have been exposed to the public recently. It would also expand the NSA’s powers, giving the agency new authority to tap cellphones, track cellphones, and would also impose 10-year sentences on any unauthorized person who accesses the NSA’s data. In other words, it's '4th amendment, fuck you' hubris raised to the googleplex power. Citizens need to barrage their reps to stop this perfidy. Whether Reepo or Demo, tell them no votes on their next election bid if they fuck this up.

The other bill, by Sen. Patrick Leahy and Jim Sensenbrenner (an original co-author of the Patriot Act), would actually reform the NSA. It would end the NSA’s bulk collection of data, require the government obtain court orders before it could use information collected on Americans, create transparency by allowing communications providers to disclose information about the orders they've received from the NSA, make FISA court orders since 2003 public, and create a public advocate for the FISA Court. Feinstein has vowed to kill Leahy’s legislation. We can't let that happen. Not on our watch, not when this may be the last, best chance to regulate the spooks gone wild.

Back to Berners-Lee. Speaking from his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he said that though he had anticipated many of the surveillance activities exposed by Snowden, including taps on the internet through the Prism program, he had not been prepared for the scale of the NSA/GCHQ operations, he "didn't realize it would be so big." At worst, such spying could damage the public's confidence in the intimate privacy of the internet as a free and safe place to interact, adding: "When you take away the safe space, you take away a lot of the power of human problem solving,".

Berners-Lee, who was honored in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, reserved his harshest words for GCHQ and the NSA's undermining of the protection afforded by encryption, which he said would benefit organized criminal hacker gangs and hostile states. He said:

"In a totalitarian state where it reckoned it was the only strong state in the world, I can imagine that being a reasonable plan. But in this situation, internet security is hard. It's naïve to imagine that if you introduce a weakness into a system you will be the only one to use it."

He also criticised the cracking of encryption on ethical grounds:

"Any democratic country has to take the high road; it has to live by its principles. I'm very sympathetic to attempts to increase security against organised crime, but you have to distinguish yourself from the criminal."

Is the U.S. really a democratic nation any more, or has it reverted to a total, lawless gangster state? - As author Michael Parenti has warned, from the time of the JFK assassination. (When the security state finally grabbed the last leash of governance via complicity in Kennedy's assassination, facilitating it and its ensuing cover-up). This 50th anniversary year of the assassination is the perfect time to apply the ultimate litmus test to see whether we're a gangster state, or still a nominally democratic nation. If Feinstein's bill wins, you damned well know the answer.

And, btw, if you believe that's "over the top", consider the words of former senior NSA official Bill Binney, who in a CBS June 19 interview declared there were "simple principles that can be used to find bad guys without violating anyone's privacy". In the NY Times piece (ibid.), at the very end, Binney goes on the record again, stating bluntly, that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform:

The agency will represent a threat of 'turnkey totalitarianism' - the capability to turn its awesome power - now directed mainly against other countries - on Americans.

To be forewarned, and all that....

See also: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/department-justice-privacy-internet-lavabit-encryption-keys

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