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

 

Neolib Hack Samuelson Defends NSA Invasion Of Privacy

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

And then the hack strikes again:


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

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


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

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

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


 "Oversight only works when the agency that oversight is directed at tells the truth, and having Mr Clapper say he gave the least untruthful answer should, in my opinion, have resulted in a firing and a prosecution,"

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

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

Oh wait, he's a Neoliberal hack!

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

See also (from someone you can trust):

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

Edward Snowden Was Right to Crow!

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

Judge Richard Leon, in a 68 -page ruling issued in Washington last Monday, vindicated Snowden by arguing that the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency is likely to violate the US constitution,  Judge Leon also declared that the mass collection of metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and was "almost Orwellian" in its scope. In a judgment replete with literary swipes against the NSA, he said James Madison, the architect of the US constitution, would be "aghast" at the scope of the agency’s collection of Americans' communications data.

This remark alone shows Snowden is not the villain the Neolib traitors make him out to be but a fuckin' HERO!  Now, add to that - if that wasn't enough -  the issuance of  a  300-page report  by a commission appointed by Obama himself - not any screwball, terror loving commie symps. The report made 46 recommendations including that the NSA be stripped of its power to collect phone records in bulk.  In addition, the panel advised that the NSA be banned from attempting to undermine the security of the internet- themes pounded by tech companies when they met with Obama on Monday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snowden put it supremely well in his WaPo interview:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snowden elaborated:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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