'Citizen Four': An Oscar-Winning Documentary Every Citizen Needs To See

Though it's been nearly two years, most alert and aware Americans still can recall the brouhaha that erupted after Edward Snowden exposed how we were all being tracked relentlessly by the NSA. Tracked using programs with cryptic names such as XKeyscore and PRISM. Tracked via our telephone calls, emails and our web wanderings - including even terms we'd googled and all the websites visited.  Of course, in the wake, the Neoliberal machine  and its 'evil sister' Neocon War-Security state,  exploded with self righteous indignation - questioning who exactly was this "traitor" (with only a high school education) that brought these things to light.

Those of us who are real Americans applauded Snowden's courage in outing the vile violators of our Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which reads:

“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.”

Clearly showing that only individual warrants are acceptable and one cannot have mass warrants issued out of laziness, disrespect for the Constitution or mere expedience and efficiency provided by technology. Moreover, Snowden was ultimately vindicated when a  300-page report     was released last year by a commission appointed by Obama himself (who was finally backed into a corner after NSA spying on foreign heads of state was made public in one release)

All this came out at the time, but what is less known is the backstory on how Snowden accomplished his file access and then made contact with the journalists who he would entrust with the actual file release. That incudes documentary film maker Laura Poitras who - with Glenn Greenwald (then journalist for the UK Guardian) took home the Oscar for the Best Documentary Feature on Sunday night.

Watching the film last night on HBO, Janice and I were both spellbound as the movie - though totally factual - had the aura of a John Le Carre spy novel. We see the first encrypted messages between Poitras and Snowden and then the instructions she needs to follow to ensure the spooks aren't listening in. As I mentioned to Janice (barely one tenth of the way in), the guy may only have a high school degree but he's absolutely brilliant as well as skilled - something the idiot corporate media downplayed when they tried to make the story about him.

The scene in his Hong Kong hotel when he needs to upload a set of documents to Greenwald's laptop is intriguing in itself, including all the sundry precautions taken to ensure electronic spying eyes or ears don't compromise the transfer. Greenwald and another Guardian journalist are then charged with releasing the files using their best judgment since Snowden didn't want his personal bias reflected. He also wanted to delay his identity being outed so the story could be about what was done to his fellow Americans, as opposed to making him the story. (Which eventually happened thanks to our Neoliberal media elites.)

Two of the more appalling scenes which made us want to chew nails, showed NSA honcho Keith Alexander and then James Clapper lying through their teeth before congress when directly asked (by Sen. Ron Wyden, in the case of Clapper) if any  phone calls of ordinary Americans had been scooped up by the NSA. (After some prodding the turkey explained it might have been done "accidentally")

Clapper lying to congress.

In another scene that soon follows, where the NSA's mass surveillance of  (Verizon) phone records is being challenged,  we see a Justice Dept. lawyer trying to argue the federal court hearing the case has no real standing and besides, "national security would be affected" if the mass seizure of phone records was stopped.

The documentary then follows Snowden's crisis after his name is released, and we see here this is what he wanted as he didn't wish to be perceived sneaking around "in the shadows".  From the CNN broadcasts the media learns he's holed up in a Hong Kong hotel and it soon becomes clear he needs to leave or risk possible extradition. He's then helped by Julian Assange and his group to make it to Russia and we see only occasional communications with Poitras keyboarded onto the screen - he's obviously taking great precautions.

The issue of the sort of justice Snowden might face (if he returned to the U.S.)  then comes up for discussion and it's noted he'd be prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act as a spy, just like other whistleblowers. There would be no comeback and no fair trial because the court and jury proceedings would be entirely weighted ab initio for Snowden's guilt as a spy.  The preservation of the amendments of the Constitution would be totally irrelevant. All of which points up the fact that those yahoos who yelp about Snowden returning and "facing justice" are idiots.

This segment also had our heads ready to explode given that Obama is a former Constitutional lawyer and essentially betrayed all his (early) promises of governmental  "transparency". What makes it even more wretched is how those doing the truth telling,  whistle -blowing have been put behind bars while the torturers and Constitutional violators have been allowed to roam free and even appear on TVs .... as opposed to being shot or turned over to the International Court in the Hague.

The segments dealing with the NSA's overstretch in spying on Brazilian leaders is also gripping, with Greenwald delivering testimony in Portuegese before the Brazilian parliament. And then William Binney, former NSA technical director, testifying before the German parliament to do with NSA's mass  spying on Germans.

The final scenes show Snowden and his girlfriend (American, who joined him in July, 2014) seen through the window of their Moscow apartment.

Leave out Oscars' host  Neil Patrick Harris' idiot snipe about 'treason'(after the award), most real Americans know that Snowden is a hero, a Constitutional protector and defender, and if this film doesn't convince you (assuming you don't believe it currently) well,  you need to admit you're just like the Good Germans. That lot who were quite happy to have the Gestapo looking over their shoulders, and were more than elated to turn their neighbors in on the slightest pretext.

Yes, Those Detention Camps Are REAL and for YOU!

Martial law: (def.) The law imposed upon citizens by a national military force when civil authority has broken down or during military operations.

"The loss of civil liberties by the American people is probably the biggest thing that's happened in this decade. Now, we no longer have habeas corpus. Any president can decide that you're an enemy combatant and put you in a military prison without trial, without lawyers, without access to your family...indefinitely. Whether you're a citizen of the United States or not. They now have active military battalions on duty - under the North American Command - ready to go and act as police in any city of the United States.

They have built detention centers throughout the country, $350 million that went to Halliburton, to expand detention centers and be prepared for martial law" - Peter Phillips, Former Director Of Project Censored, and now Direction of Media Freedom Foundation.

In the previous post I examined Chris Hedges' exposure of Ivy League institutions as seed beds for elite control of the country,  spanning the areas of business, economics and politics. At the end I also referenced Thomas Frank's quote of Obama to the effect that he was the "only thing" standing between investment bankers and "the pitchforks". The latter is the metaphor used for public or populist outrage at any given shenanigan or even national policy. At its extreme, if investment bankers or any other elites really had anything to fear, it would be mass insurrection or revolution - with the Right and Left finally coming together to oust all of them and who knows what else. Think of the Ukraine- Kiev  uprising back in March but magnified one million times.

The U.S. Neocons and their allies cheered while the "pitchforks" came out in the Ukraine and ousted the democratically elected leader, Viktor Yanukyovich , but don't think for a second they or the national security state would tolerate the same thing here. Say if millions across the nation got violently disaffected with economic conditions and acted out.  In this sense there's always been a measure of hypocrisy but Official Washington used to at least pretend to stand for “democracy,” rather than taking such obvious pleasure in destabilizing elected governments, encouraging riots, overturning constitutional systems and then praising violent putsches - while removing all possibility for such at home - including elimination of habeas corpus (via the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and setting up the COG and Main Core programs as well as expanding corporate -constructed detention camps.

Of course, mass popular insurrection directed at the elite corporate power structure is the corporate security state's worst nightmare. (As Chris Hedges notes, op. cit., p. 177: "The emergence of the corporate state always means the emergence of the security state.") And they have also harbored incessant fears of its realization since the 1960s, especially with probabilities increasing as economic conditions and inequality worsen. But mostly they've been able to keep the anger at bay via the use of the media - to create umpteen diversions to titillate the masses and anesthetize them, or ply them with so many choices they can't decide whether to shit or go blind, far less grab a pitchfork to take out an elite. See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/07/media-and-human-attention-whos-to-blame.html

For a long time I admit that I dismissed the crazies on the Right - who endlessly yapped about "FEMA concentration camps" - as whackos, nuts and loony tunes. Their conspiracy theories - including of UN  black helicopters, gave all conspiracies (even legitimate ones like Watergate and the Kennedy assassination) a bad rap and rendered them easier to lampoon by the media cynics. However, after seeing the film "Project Censored the Movie" and extracting further documents based on it, including from  the Project Censored archives i.e.

http://www.projectcensored.org/14-homeland-security-contracts-kbr-to-build-detention-centers-in-the-us/

I became convinced the Righties were basically on to something. They just got the time line a bit wrong. As researcher Peter Dale Scott points out in an update to the Project Censored article (in the above link), it was actually under Reagan that: FEMA’s former plans ‘for the detention of at least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps’  had arisen.  The basis was to obviously prevent mass riots such as occurred in the 1960s in hundreds of American cities. The reasoning is that Reagan's planned "Reagonomics" supply side impositions would so badly extirpate the social support programs for many African-Americans that it would be intolerable.

But the Righties failed to go to the next level, which was the construction or expansion of existing detention facilities by KBR - an offshoot of Halliburton, soon after Bush Jr., Cheney and that lot revamped the COG (continuity of government) program to include a wide swatch of "domestic terrorists" and malcontents.  Indeed, in the movie, a map is shown of all the detention facilities expanded by KBR, stretching from California to New England. Clearly, the elites hatched out of the Ivies (see previous post) and controlling our nation's destiny aren't about to go quietly into that good night.


As I noted in a previous blog post:

 According to the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 326; cf. p. 38), "Contingency plans for the continuity of government" were implemented on September 11, 2001. But what measures were invoked remains unclear, though Giuffrida’s template was believed to be integrated into it and former Reaganites were in the WH at the time, who had shared earlier in the architecture (Rumsfeld, Cheney etc.)


 Those suspicious of what COG means today have pointed to a number of post 9/11 steps to facilitate the implementation of martial law, including the creation of a new military command (NORTHCOM) for the continental United States. They note also Homeland Security’s strategic plan “Endgame”, whose stated goal is the creation of detention camps designed to "remove all removable aliens," including "potential terrorists."


- Even worse, later mutations of COG under the Bushites  equated political dissent with treason. (Now we 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!)

In regard to the last, the definition of "terrorist" was expanded to "domestic terrorist" by congress in 2001, to include:

"…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!

Most concern has been expressed at the Main Core program which 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 think this is a joke or conspiracy theory nonsense are not paying attention, especially on how the hammer of the security state was brought down on Occupy Wall Street protestors two years ago.  See e.g. http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1494

All of this, of course, facilitated by the NSA's mass surveillance programs - XKeyscore, MUSCULAR, PRISM etc.

The Elite power structure also knows these mass warrant, 4th amendment violating programs are essential, not for "terrorists" or to prevent terror attacks, but to get a handle on who all the potential domestic trouble makers are if a mass eruption does break out.  As Chris Hedges observes (p. 177):

"As the pressure mounts, as this despair and impoverishment reach larger and larger segments of the populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. ...This is why the Bush White House pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal) , the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of 'extraordinary rendition', the practice of warrantless wiretapping on American citizens, and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections...

It's all part of a package, It comes together. The motive behind these measures is not to fight terrorism or to bolster national security. It is to seize and maintain internal control."

Hedges notes that the real purpose for these programs leaked out in the course of a Senate Intelligence meeting in February and March, 2009.  That was when then Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testified that the "deepening economic crisis posed the gravest threat to stability and national security".  It could "trigger" he said, "a return to the violent extremism of the 1920s and 1930s." The implication was that the immediate means and infrastructure needed to be brought up to speed to identify and detain those who might adversely affect corporate state security. The widespread NSA programs, as exposed by Snowden,  followed almost immediately in the wake.

Were Blair's worries justified?  Of course! Because no normal human or mass aggregation is prepared to be shat on their heads forever, exploited and ground under like so much dirt while the elites enjoy their weekend golf jaunts to St. Kitts, as their wives get costly rose wine wraps, e.g.
















Oh we also wouldn't want to deprive them of their special gold -lined bath tubs, and $25,000 apiece Frrrozen Haute Chocolate delicacies now (see below), would we?

 Oh wait, I mustn't do that! No, no and no! That's waging "class warfare" on the little turds!


But you get my point! Just presenting these class warfare images could easily entice the next President - god forbid Ted Cruz or Paul Ryan or that porker Chris Christie, to declare me an "enemy (of the rich) combatant" and have me dragged away to one of those KBR made detention centers.

But the sad fact is one guy raising hell on his blog is mostly going to elicit a big yawn from the elites. The truth is that most Americans are so hypnotized by their little consumer toys, Ipads, smart phones and Facebook that they're nowhere near to being discontented on a level to inspire a Kiev-like insurrection against the corporatists. And a large part of this is the zombie media saturation as well as the false statistics, such as the consumer price index, that Chris Hedges notes the power structure uses to keep people baffled with bullshit.

Want to know the sad truth in all this?  The people most likely to get riled up and take it out on all our hides, whether in domestic bombings (like Oklahoma City) or para-military standoffs (like Waco incident on Clinton's watch) will be the radical Right. As Hedges grimly observes (p. 183):

"As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class; as the Democratic and Republican parties expose themselves as craven tools of our corporate state; as savings accounts, college funds, and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment skyrockets and home values go up in smoke, we must prepare for the political re-emergence of the reinvigorated Right wing radicals."

In other words, we may well be put on a track analogous to that in 1932-33 leading Germans to the nightmare of the Third Reich. Only our version will be much worse, since a Right wing controlled NSA- say with a Ted Cruz at the helm as President- would be vastly more powerful than the Nazi Gestapo.

See also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-oneill/57092/the-spoils-of-class-warfare

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-johnson/57086/corporate-tax-deferral-inversions-and-the-destructive-result

and:
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/22/a_much_larger_and_more_dangerous_movement_right_wing_militias_thrive_post_bundy_and_the_media_wont_talk_about_it/

Is No One Prepared to Collar the NSA and Its Zealous Overeach?

Edward Snowden, a true patriot, receives his ACLU card from Anthony Romero.

Does the NSA even understand the meaning of the 4th amendment? Does Congress? Especially the weasel rats that signed onto the FISA Amendments Act of 2008  which ratified and expanded the warrantless surveillance program originating under Bush Jr. But rather than adhering to their sworn oaths to protect and defend the Constitution , these vermin rats legalized Bush's transgressions - thereby setting the stage for the latest outrages.

For those who may not have been paying attention, a 4-month investigation by the WaPo has found that ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks. In other words, the so-called protective surveillance is merely an extended fishing expedition that often scarfs up incidental private material of average Americans.

Most pertinent: Nine of 10 internet account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

What sort of stuff was caught? According to the Post:


"Medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.   Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops."

Can this even be believed? I mean, this is insight into an agency gone rogue and even crazy!

Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-named PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks. According to the Post:

"No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects — not only from its targets but also from people who may cross a target’s path."

Let's also reference here the basis of how this crap evolved, and make reference here to Jim Sensenbrenner who co-authored the Patriot Act (with Patrick Leahy). In the Summer 2014 issue of the ACLU STAND magazine, Sensenbrenner writes:

"Section 215 was intended to give the government the ability to secure 'any tangible thing' connected to specific terrorism investigations. As is now common knowledge, the Bush and Obama administrations took the limited power Congress intended and went rogue. If we had known during any subsequent re-authorizations what we now know about Section 215's blatant misinterpretation, Congress would have allowed it to sunset.  And if it's not fixed by the 2015 re-authorization, Congress will.

The basic idea behind the American search and seizure law is that you can't investigate unless you can first provide at least some articulable reason to do so. Investigations just can't be arbitrary. The government's definition, on the other hand, is the very definition of arbitrary. "

Thus Snowden's revelations have consistently shown the extent of overreach by the NSA in its illegal mass surveillance, via assorted programs including PRISM, XKeyscore and MUSCULAR. Congress refuses to act in a substantial and coherent way (with the exception of the USA Freedom Act- which trolls like Feinstein have vowed to gut) because they see an advantage in looking the other way. Besides, most are cowards and don't want to be criticized as "unpatriotic" by the FOXite orbit.

By law, the NSA may “target” only foreign nationals located overseas unless it obtains a warrant based on probable cause from a special surveillance court. For collection under PRISM and Upstream rules, analysts must state a reasonable belief that the target has information of value about a foreign government, a terrorist organization or the spread of nonconventional weapons.

But the indiscriminate NSA net discloses "warrants based on probable cause" are mostly a contrived fiction. Most  of the people caught up in those programs were not the targets and would not lawfully qualify as such. “Incidental collection” of third-party communications is inevitable in many forms of surveillance, but in other contexts the U.S. government works harder to limit and discard irrelevant data. In criminal wiretaps, for example, the FBI is supposed to stop listening to a call if a suspect’s wife or child is using the phone. Why does the NSA get a pass or take a pass? Because as Sensenbrenner notes: "the Bush and Obama administrations took the limited power Congress intended and went rogue".


Worse, many congress critters and Senators have since signed on to this perfidy and encouraged even stronger surveillance.  Recall back in November, Feinstein tabled her own bill to counter the USA Freedom Act of Sensenbrenner and Leahy. It basically codified 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.”

And yet, fellow citizens, that is what we are on the verge of, unless courageous people dedicated to the Constitution act and stand up on principle.

The problem is that as the hysteria over the ISIS group in Iraq increases, and "national security" again instills fear in too many, more congress critters may prefer to opt for "security" than civil liberty. In other words, another round of terrorist fear may well spark even more draconian national security dragnets with more Americans caught up in the web.

Obviously, many Americans are simply too lame or dumb to care.  And probably see nothing wrong in the Post's revelations. Wives picked up in skimpy Victoria's Secret lingerie  posing on their beds, or toddlers frolicking in bathtubs? No problem! These mock  'Muricans will simply lay down like dogs and say 'I  just wanna  be made safe from Baghdadi and ISIS, so do it some more!"   Which shows they have no grasp of the 4th amendment and probably don't deserve liberty in any case. They are an affront to what my Revolutionary War ancestor Conrad Brumbaugh fought for.

Worse, they are like the 'good Germans' who looked the other way as Hitler's Gestapo collected information on all their friends and neighbors - and they even provided extra help. Sadly, we have to share the country with these security lap dogs, as we do Neoliberal traitors to the Constitution like Dianna Feinstein and Lindsey Graham.

The true citizen can only hope that at some stage a real patriot -  or preferably patriots - stands with Edward Snowden to help collar the NSA nuts gone wild, and steer this nation back to surveillance sobriety and temperance. If not, the last vestiges of privacy will soon be a long lost memory never to be resurrected again. We will then be on our way to mutating to a full fascist state.
  
See also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/56797/hillary-clinton-flaunts-her-surveillance-state-baggage

Supreme Court's Decision on Cell Phone Searches Also Has Implications for NSA Mass Surveillance

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

Mass spying is designed to identify all citizens who oppose both imperial wars and destruction of domestic welfare." -  James Petras, in an August, 2012 article on American loss of civil liberties.


The Supreme Court's 9-0 decision yesterday,  declaring that any cell phone searches by cops (who stop motor vehicles)  requires individual warrants  should not have been any surprise to defenders of the Constitution and specifically 4th amendment rights.  That it was a victory for citizen privacy rights embodied in the 4th amendment is an understatement. Let us reprise and re-read that amendment again, which forms the cornerstone of what makes this nation different from all others:

“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.”

The Justices' unanimous, broadly written and emphatic decision vindicated this amendment and also laid waste to the Obama administration's ludicrous analogy that cell phones were "like wallets". Such constitutional deafness may also explain why the Obama-ites see no problem in NSA mass surveillance and why they regard Edward Snowden as a criminal instead of a whistleblowing patriot as most of us who respect the Constitution do.

I mean think about it,  for god's sake! Cell phones  - LIKE one's home computer - carry everything about a person' identity, life and transactions,, including: photographs, email, banking records, medical records. Why would grabbing a person's cell not be a violation of the 4th? Only a person or group blind to the amendment and what it states would be oblivious to that and regard it only like a "wallet" which has a few credit cards perhaps and an ID, but not the contents of one's personal life.

As Justice Roberts declared as part of his opinion:

"Sensitive personal information can form a revealing montage of a user's life and the same cannot be said of a photograph or two tucked inside a wallet"

Surely now, it can't be only me that sees ramifications to NSA mass surveillance on the indiscriminate scope revealed by Snowden. Specifically, in the same way cops can no longer  rummage through your cell phone on a de facto fishing expedition the NSA shouldn't be able to do the same with your computer (laptop, etc.) files...OR your cell phone.

In other words, if the Justices' ruling applies to over eager cops, it also needs to apply to an over eager NSA. They also need to obtain specific warrants as opposed to the 4th amendment violation mass warrants issued under a revised 2011 FISA law that debased and undermined the original.

The same arguments that apply with such force to cell phones, must also apply to any other devices that hold one's personal life profiles, including desktops, laptops, notebooks, smart phones etc.  Note, “secure in one’s person, house, papers, effects” implies PRIVACY! And it applies not only to your home but everything in it containing sensitive personal information. These are after all MY private papers, my private effects, my house, etc. If an inherent right to privacy under the 4th was a myth then being secure in one’s person, papers, effects wouldn’t matter.

Hell, the SC Justices could have ruled to let the whole freakin’ world see ‘em on anyone's cell! They didn't because they understood the language of the 4th is ironclad.  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.

Readers also might wish to recall or reference that one of the key outrages in the 1770s that led to the Revolutionary War (which my ancestor Conrad Brumbaugh fought in) was the British use of mass warrants.  They defied any concepts of "personal" and smashed into colonists' homes on any pretext- tearing it apart.   This applied to the infamous Writs of Assistance which was the vehicle used to justify smashing into homes to find smuggled goods. By the 1770s the use of the Writs of Assistance had become totally indiscriminate. As one academic site explained:

"Most notably, the writs allowed officials to enter and ransack private homes without proving probable cause for suspicion, a traditional prerequisite to a search."

This bears perfect analogy to what the NSA is getting away with today using the mass warrants and its PRISM, Xkeyscore and MUSCULAR programs.  Notes and letters gleaned from colonists of the time revealed total outrage and it is no exaggeration to say that it sparked the first shots of the Revolutionary War.

In writing the 4th amendment, the framers were motivated more than anything by the excesses of the Writs of Assistance.  This is why they deliberately singled out the need for authorities to obtain specific or individual warrants - mass warrants were anathema. The framers wanted no repeat of the outrages that launched the Revolution.

While no specific "right" to privacy is listed in the Bill of Rights,  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. Hence, use of the descriptor “personal” applied to papers, effects etc. and naturally meant private! Even if one for some reason disputed the argument, he’d still be left with the fact of the unenumerated rights under the Ninth amendment.  The Ninth Amendment states that “the people retain unenumerated rights” "The people:" here refers to flesh and blood citizens, not to a bunch of contractual abstractions (states), or to corporations. .As Prof. Garry Wills emphasizes and underscores (A Necessary Evil: A History Of American Distrust of Government’, Simon & Schuster, 1999, p. 108):

“The states have no natural rights. Their powers are artificial, not natural – they are things made by contract.”

What we conclude then is the NSA mass surveillance,  and use of mass warrants,  discloses a rejection not only of citizens’ fundamental right to privacy but any right to be secure in one’s person, papers, effects.

The Justices' ruling on restricting seizure and grabbing of cell phones must therefore apply with equal force to personal information on any and all computers!   Justice Roberts, in a footnote, seemed to take issue with that, observing that “these  (cell phone) cases do not implicate the question whether the collection or inspection of aggregated digital information amounts to a search under other circumstances.”  However, it is clear that rigorous adherence to the language of the 4th shows that it does. So that "aggregated accumulation and inspection of digital information" is really no different from the indiscriminate searches done under the British Writs of Assistance that led directly to the Revolutionary War!

Let us hope that the Right wing court soon gets on the same page, and its cell phone ruling is  formalized to another more sweeping judgment very soon!

See also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/56598/tomgram-peter-van-buren-what-weve-lost-since-9-11-part-2

and:

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/26/john_roberts_channels_aclu_why_right_wing_court_saved_cellphone_privacy/

Snowden Gets His Say And the Traitors, Weasels and Neolib Cowards Go Nuts

WHO are you gonna believe? A patriot defending your 4th amendment rights like Ed Snowden, or a weasel and cowardly 4th amendment traitor like 'Lurch' Kerry?

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

"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open." - Thomas Jefferson, in 'Notes on Virginia'.

Last night, Edward Snowden finally had his say on network American TV ('Inside the Mind of Edward Snowden', NBC) in a prime time interview by Brian Williams. Even before the interview aired, Williams - on NBC Nightly News - in previewing the interview, noted many viewers had written the network expressing their disgust and they may never watch it again. They also labeled him a "traitor".

My reaction? These are mock Americans who don’t  deserve liberty. These are what I call sheeple as opposed to free-thinking people. (Brian Williams at the end of his interview said:  "Many Americans are upset at Snowden because they can no longer sleep soundly at night" - on account of terrorists now getting the better of us.  Awwww....boo hoo hoo, poor little babies! Give 'em a sippy cup and a change of diapers!) They’ve meekly followed and imbibed the propaganda spewed by the corpora-media and the security state which is the real culprit in terms of trashing the 4th amendment. As Snowden pointed out to Williams,  in a real democracy we ought not be tolerating any "security state" - the two are mutually exclusive. So again, as Ben Franklin posed it - do we want liberty or security?

Anyway, it's the whining,  infantilized wusses who’ve followed the lead of the American puppet media by making Snowden and his travails, asylum seeking and persecution the story instead of the vile overreach he disclosed – which as others have pointed out – leads the way to tyranny (especially via the COG program).


What does that make these mock Americans? In my book it makes them “Good Germans”. Go back to the end of World War II and the American occupation of Germany in the years after 1945. We assailed the “weak” German people and mocked them for not standing up to the growing metastasis of Hitler’s Reich which they obviously saw but did nothing about. These vermin actually praised the Gestapo and helped rat out their neighbors to them, usually for speaking against Hitler or hiding Jews.

Who would have believed 80 years later, a coterie of weak-blooded, meek, pseudo-patriot,  pussified "Americans" (and I use that term very loosely - hence the scare quotes) would emulate the Gestapo-loving Germans of the 1930s? But there it is!

Then there was the weasel, coward and 4th amendment traitor John Kerry, mouthing off on the same news segment and bellowing about the "damage" Snowden caused (he likely meant more the embarrassment at being caught out) and calling him a "coward and traitor".  Imagine Kerry's nerve calling Snowden a "coward" when he essentially burned all his bridges to leave a comfortable life behind to alert too many underserving 'Muricans what was being done in their name.

Meanwhile, the real coward is Kerry, who in the 2004 Presidential election ran with his tail between his legs - instead of standing and fighting - when the 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' unloaded on him.  Then, after the violations of voting rights were disclosed in Ohio (including suppressing minority voters by limiting polling places and making many use "provisional" ballots), this weasel never followed up and demanded a full -on investigation. He just punked out like the punk he is.

Kerry is also a hypocrite and 4th amendment traitor. Recall back in March Lurch's boffo performance in actually claiming:

"It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country,” Kerry said on Face the Nation.

Kerry clearly displayed  NO historical memory at all.  In a blog post at the time I had to give this delusional chump a hint about this nation's  "willful choice to invade another country" and using a "completely trumped up pretext" as in "WMD" to do a shock and awe in Iraq. A "war" and invasion which was illegal from the get go.

But Kerry's treachery, as well as that of most of congress, inheres in changing the law (the 1978 FISA law) originally there to protect us from overweening surveillance, following the exposure of illegal wiretapping by Bush. The latter was then rendered "legal" via a revised FISA law,  effectively  gutting the 4th amendment and paving the way for dragnet NSA surveillance.  As Robert Scheer noted in a June 25, 2013 blog post on smirkingchimp.com, ‘The Good Germans in Government’:


"Read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and tell me that Edward Snowden is not a hero in the mold of those who founded this republic. Check out the Nuremberg war crime trials and ponder our current contempt for the importance of individual conscience as a civic obligation”

How important is that individual conscience in terms of ethics? At the Nuremberg War Crimes trials we informed the Nazis it trumped all else, even government regulations, laws and orders! The operating Principle (VI) came to be known as the Nuremberg Code and clearly states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to orders of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

Note this Principle’s injunction is exactly analogous to what Edward Snowden followed. He had allegedly binding orders and “oaths” by which the government found it expedient to limit his actions, but he saw (as the U.S. military leaders did at Nuremberg) that the option of a higher moral choice dictated he inform the American people – whose liberties were at stake and threatened – of what was being done in their name.

Moreover, Snowden has since been vindicated. Judge Richard Leon, in a 68 -page ruling issued in Washington December 17, 2013, vindicated Snowden by arguing that the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency is likely to violate the U.S. 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 last December. (Which makes a mockery of what one talking head "national security" specialist said on CBS' Early Show this morning, i.e. Snowden "hurting tech companies" - when he in fact revealed how the NSA had done so, by unraveling their security systems!)

Even Jim Sensenbrenner, who helped write the Patriot Act, declared that the intent of the law was never to allow the NSA the latitude of mass surveillance that Snowden revealed.  I was also delighted to see Colorado Senator Mark Udall, a leading critic of the NSA overreach who said - in his own words:

"The  (Leon) 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,"

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'). 

So why have so many of our compatriots mindlessly branded him a traitor? Because those forlorn consumers have lost track of their rights as well as obligations as citizens, and basically surrendered them to the state. They may also be deliriously ignorant of the warp and woof of the rights inherent in the Fourth Amendment - and we know that polls taken after 9/11 disclose 3 of 5 Americans couldn't name three of the Bill of Rights. 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 embodied in PRISM, 'Boundless Informant', XKeyscore, etc.  directly violate the 4th amendment, and yeah, I'm as much a stickler about the 4th as the gun people are about the 2nd.

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

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.

As for 'Lurch' Kerry, he isn't even fit to lick the bottom of Snowden's shoes. Kerry, a Neolib punk who wouldn't even stand up for himself against a torrent of abuse in an election - doesn't  belong in the same room with a real patriot and hero.  The fact Kerry could brand Snowden a "fugitive" and demand he "man up" (to turn himself in and face Kangaroo court justice) shows how little he grasps of the core issues at stake here. But if this fool, tool and hypocrite couldn't even grasp that the U.S. violated international law when it illegally invaded Iraq (while branding Russia the bad guy for occupying Crimea) then we see what a poseur he is. It's Neoliberal weasels like John Kerry who will spell the end of this Republic, not red-blooded American heroes like Edward Snowden!

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Footnote: The NSA claims it's only been able to recover "one email" of Snowden's to the effect he made any effort to bring his concerns to the attention of higher ups. Now, if anyone really believes that this is all the spooks could really turn up, well, I have some prime beach front property in Barbados to sell you for a song!

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/alfredo-lopez/56122/usa-freedom-act-has-nothing-to-do-with-freedom-phone-surveillance-reform-bill-passed-by-the-house-is-

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/29/watch_highlights_from_edward_snowdens_interview_with_brian_williams/

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

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

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

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

The  Guardian added that:

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

According to The Guardian again:

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

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

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

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

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

It noted:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

See that, you "porno terrorists"?

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

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

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

Where is  Emmanuel Goldstein when we need him?

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