Just Like Torture: NSA Spying is Legal

Just like the crushing of a child's testicles can be interpreted to be "legal" within the context of the dictatorial power of the unitary executive as former Bush-Cheney lawyer John Yoo once infamously declared but now all of that NSA mass surveillance and data-mining is "legal" now too.  In a resounding endorsement of the unconstitutional abuses of the American Stasi the "independent"  Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board - which happens to reside within the executive branch  and was formed in 2004 after 9/11 or 'the day when everything changed' has issued a report that is being touted by defenders of the corrupt US power structure as vindication for the programs that NSA whistleblower revealed. George Orwell was definitely an optimist in that he never could have foreseen his grim visions of a savage totalitarian society so meshed with the circus maximus that is the USA!, USA! USA!

According to a story from The Guardian entitled "Some NSA data collection is 'legal and effective', says independent board" , I excerpt the following:

An independent board has declared a set of National Security Agency data collection programs both "legal and effective in protecting national security", despite expressing concern about "intrusions" into individuals' privacy.

As the NSA's troves of ostensibly foreign emails and Americans' international communications come under heavy scrutiny, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board dealt the NSA a victory on Tuesday night by calling the information reaped "valuable". It pointedly rejected similar claims for the bulk collection of US call data in a January report.

Under the so-called "702 program" – named after section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008 – the NSA can harvest large amounts of ostensibly foreign digital information, including Americans' international communications.

AND

In another vindication for the NSA, the PCLOB assessed that the NSA's massive amounts of data collected under section 702 is not "bulk" collection, describing itself as "impressed with the rigor" of government surveillance targeting.

The NSA defends its Prism and "upstream" communications troves long after it has accepted divestiture of US phone records. Representatives from the intelligence agencies and the Obama administration sternly defend both the legality and the wisdom of retaining those content and metadata databases as a measure to defend the US against terrorism, espionage and even crime.

The PCLOB is "independent" alright - in the same way that a Tony Soprano ordered internal audit of the Bada Bing Club conducted by Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti would be and this is just pure damage control, pails of whitewash being applied to our nearly fully evolved fascist state and indicative of a concerted effort to make all of the NSA bad publicity just go away.

The rogue establishment is riding high too, especially after at least temporarily quashing that much heralded Glenn Greenwald piece, conducting a mafia style knee-capping on the journalist while he was busy doing his victory lap after the Polk Award, the Pulitzer Prize and his best-selling book on the Snowden revelations "No Place to Hide". There are probably high-fives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Fort Meade NSA Stasi HQ and throughout the national surveillance state, tax-dollar eating great parasite after Greenwald was forced by the government (and likely his billionaire boss Pierre Omidyar whose money funds neo-Nazi atrocities in Ukraine) to pour water over the "fireworks". The preemption of the Greenwald story is likely going to be a mortal wound to the fledgling website The Intercept as well as his long-term reputation itself. This is a shame because the man had stones in standing up to Uncle Scam and his murderous machine of plunder and oppression but you can really only push things so far if you are working within the establishment.

So the state-corporate media will continue to trumpet the "legal" NSA surveillance just as they covered up the same sort of torture techniques that had members of the Nazi command and the Japanese Empire hanged after war crimes trials at the end of World War II - the end of a bygone era when there was actually some moral clarity in this country.

And the "legalization" comes just in time for those patriotic Fourth of July BBQ's where Americans will drink beer, ingest Pink Slime laced hamburgers and dance the slow grind to Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" as though it were our own equivalent of "The Horst Wessel Song". 

They will also be enjoying the fireworks - too bad that they won't be the ones that Glenn Greenwald promised. 

Anti-Spying Blimp Flown Over Massive NSA Data Storage Facility in Utah

In an attempt to bring publicity to the mass surveillance and data-mining activities of the American Stasi a blimp with the message "Illegal Spying Below" was flown over that massive data storage facility that the NSA has built in Bluffdale, Utah. The blimp was a joint venture between three disparate activist groups Greenpeace, The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tenth Amendment Center in an alliance that confounds the corrupt two-party power structure and the phony left-right paradigm and proves that people can set aside differences and unite against a shared enemy. I have long advocated for a coming together of libertarians, progressives and principled conservatives to push for a restoration of the rule of law as set forth in the US Constitution and the defeat of the creeping fascism that is now evolving into full-blown totalitarianism - largely thanks to the NSA - because if it isn't stopped or at least significantly slowed, then nothing else is really going to matter.

The Bluffdale center provides the government and those with the money to purchase political clout as well as vested special interests with a veritable wet dream of locking down their power for perpetuity by allowing for the hoarding and storage of every aspect of a person's life so that when a threat to the system is identified then a case will be able to be built for their prosecution and imprisonment. There has already been a revelation of "parallel construction" activities in which law enforcement uses data illegally provided by the NSA for targeting purposes and then goes about building a completely phony case against the individual. This is what one might expect to exist in a classical totalitarian state where government goons like the Gestapo, the NKVD, SAVAK or actual Stasi operated with impunity to crush dissent and to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis - it can happen here.

The world of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report and Pre-Crime is coming and coming soon once that data center is fully operational and stocked with information and the political climate dictates it. The NSA has always been about going after dissent and not any bullshit war on terror unless one realizes that the rogue state views us, it's own citizens as the "terrorists".  The real targets - and I am anxiously awaiting the "imminent" Glenn Greenwald story on Snowden's list - will be environmentalists, anti-government activists and writers, human rights activists and lawyers, supporters of Wikileaks, Anonymous and the Occupy movement, antiwar activists, climate change activists, privacy advocates, anti-corporate activists, ACLU members, bloggers and journalists, BDS activists and any other organization that serves to challenge the corrupt elite and those sympathetic to anti-establishment views. The crimes of hijacking the system, destroying democracy and stealing from the poor and middle class to enrich the elite have already been perpetrated and it is the job of the NSA and it's corporate partners to ensure that they are never discovered or challenged.

Other than the "Illegal Spying Below" blimp another NSA related story from Friday is the findings of a transparency report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) which is the agency headed up by pathological liar James Clapper. For what it's worth the report claims that the NSA only actually queried the phone records of 248 Americans, a ridiculously low number considering the extent of the mass surveillance and probably more of the total bullshit that has been shoveled down the throats of Americans by an agency that has no inclination to provide anything remotely resembling the truth. Per a story from The Guardian entitled "NSA queried phone records of just 248 people despite massive data sweep" from which I excerpt:

The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American.

As acknowledged in the NSA's first-ever disclosure of statistics about how it uses its broad surveillance authorities, released Friday, the NSA performed queries of its massive phone records troves for 248 "known or presumed US persons" in 2013.

AND

The number of "selectors" NSA queried from that data trove, a term referring to an account and not necessarily an individual user, was 423 in 2013, an increase from the "less than 300 times" it searched through the data trove in 2012, according to former deputy NSA director John Inglis.

"This transparency report is significant because it shows for the first time on an annual basis both targets of business-record orders and the number of US persons specifically targeted with these metadata queries," said Alan Butler, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"These are critical numbers to review when talking about a program that sweeps in the records of hundreds of millions of Americans."

Considering the billions if not trillions of dollars invested in the surveillance colossus the "248" number is suspect for several reasons. First and foremost is that if that is a true number (just for argument's sake let's say it is) then the entire surveillance state Gomorrah is an enormous waste of money that exists to loot the American taxpayers to create jobs for the millions who are employed by the intelligence agencies, their extensive networks of contractors and the infrastructure that the politicians who benefit continue to fund. We have far too many legitimate problems in this country to throw money into an domestic surveillance apparatus that only finds "248" targets. Secondly, these are ODNI figures and again, James Clapper is a man who perjured himself in front of Congress so really, how much credence can possibly be put into such a report. Thirdly, the numbers are subject to being cooked in that the NSA has that extensive network of contractors as well as foreign partners such as the UK's GCHQ which as has been already revealed by the Snowden documents as engaged in critical activities such as sexual blackmail so as to ostensibly lend the NSA plausible deniability. The report just doesn't pass the smell test, again I excerpt from The Guardian: story:

"These are critical numbers to review when talking about a program that sweeps in the records of hundreds of millions of Americans."

Some privacy advocates expressed scepticism about how genuine and accurate an account of NSA surveillance the report actually provides.

"The ODNI report calls itself into question by saying they're providing numbers, but immediately saying those numbers are only true to the extent the intelligence community believes it can release them without compromising sensitive information," said Amie Stepanovich of the digital rights group Access.

"The numbers could be much greater, and made to look smaller because of what the intelligence community calls preserving intelligence programs.

Weasel words  if there ever were any - "preserving intelligence programs" -  that is just more of the same Orwellian nonsense like calling torture "enhanced interrogation techniques" but sadly the bastards continue to get away with it all.  

Greenwald Touts Imminent Release of Shocking NSA Story

Having successfully forced the hand of the US power structure in returning to America despite threats of his arrest and imprisonment - where he likely would have been tortured - Glenn Greenwald has been hitting the media circuit to speak and promote his book "No Place to Hide". This really must burn the Obama regime although they due to their own arrogance and foolhardy recklessness have other fish to fry with percolating foreign opportunities for regime change in Russia, Syria and now Iraq but having Greenwald hauled in by government thugs and disappeared into the bowels of our massive prison system would have just been too much bad publicity - especially in an election year.

Greenwald has let slip that a new story, with shocking details as to who exactly is being spied on by the NSA Stasi and their bogus "anti-terrorist" mass surveillance and data-mining programs is "imminent". In an interview with FOX News in which the host Sheppard Smith continued to pepper Greenwald with talking points by protectors of the fascist state who still peddle the hogwash that former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower being some sort of sinister Russian operative and the most recently "why doesn't he come home to face the judicial system" or to as the insidious Skull and Bones pedigreed US Secretary of State John Kerry puts it "man up". Greenwald was attacked by the sleazy anti-Muslim bigot Bill Maher on HBO over the weekend along with the media's  go-to veteran "activist" Paul Reickhoff who accused Snowden of helping "terrorists" and posed the same question. Of course any fair trial of Snowden is a joke and only food for the lemmings because he would be disappeared into some military prison and tortured, never to be heard from again except for the obligatory show trial -where under the archaic and anti-American 1917 Espionage Act that Obama and Holder so adore - he would not even be able to defend himself. Greenwald continues to emphasize this but it will not resonate with Americans who are historically ignorant of all but the state sanctioned indoctrination of exceptionalist glory.

Waiting for Greenwald's big revelations, originally promised by the Pulitzer Prize winner in a GQ interview "The Man Who Knows Too Much" as well as in another interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now has been an exercise in frustration. It does appear from Greenwald's reference to "imminent" that something big is finally, after all of this time coming.  For reference I excerpt from the GQ article:

We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

As well as from Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: And the document you include from October 3rd, 2012, about the NSA targeting of, quote, "radicals"?

GLENN GREENWALD: You know, one of the interesting things is, obviously, people are very aware of the COINTEL abuses. I know you’ve had people on your show who actually participated in the break-in of the FBI and took the documents that unveiled that program. People are aware of J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses. The nature of that series of events is that the United States government looks at people who oppose what they do as being, quote-unquote, "threats." That’s the nature of power, is to regard anybody who’s a threat to your power as a broad national security threat. And a lot of times people will say, "We don’t yet have the reporting in this case that shows that kind of abuse." And a lot of that reporting is still reporting that we’re working on and that I promise you is coming.

I suspect that the story will divulge what many have long suspected in that political dissidents, activists and any who represent a threat to the new post-September 11, 2001 order of fascism at home and militarism and murder abroad will be the ones who are targeted. I also suspect that journalists will be among the targets, there was a program that was revealed several years back FIRSTFRUITS that specifically targeted members of the media. Washington's Blog recently ran a series of pieces based on interviews conducted with pre-Snowden NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and I except at length from the first of the pieces:

But after 9/11, NSA instead adopted the competing “Stellar Wind” system, which didn’t protect Americans’ privacy, and was less effective and more expensive.

THOMAS DRAKE: Part of what I discovered is that part of the surveillance system, part of the Stellar Wind system – and that’s an umbrella term in itself – there were offshoots of that.

It metastasized. It grew like a cancer on the body politic.

One of the things that was done was [along the lines of]: “You know what? We’ve got to make sure” (because they were paranoid) “we’ve got to make sure that this stuff doesn’t get out … oh yeah, the press. Let’s violate the Fourth Amendment and just monitor the press.”

The whole story of that has not come out.

There was a program called “First Fruits”. They’ve no doubt changed the name of the program [since then.]

And that First Fruits program was a cutout which was designed from all of the domestic surveillance take. “Let’s just pipe off from all” that is involving designated [reporters] … or in some cases whole groups of reporters and journalists.

So you’re targeting actual newspapers. You’re targeting media outlets.

And you’re monitoring – on a persistent basis – their communications.

The surveillance of reporters and news organizations who can't simply be bought off like the plethora of dishonest and dishonorable scumbags who are eager to serve the state for money, celebrity and inclusion at the right events, dinners and cocktail parties of the Beltway elite is a given and while Obama has escalated it the programs had their roots under Bush-Cheney and even before. Obama and the longtime fixer Eric Holder have waged a war against journalism that is unprecedented in the history of this country or at least since Woodrow Wilson's filthy Espionage Act was passed. Let's hope that Greenwald's "imminent" story finally provides a wake up call that can no longer be ignored despite the thorough corruption of the domestic "mainstream" media.

Would You Buy a Car From This Man?

As an American would you put your full faith and trust in not only an agent of the US Government but one of President Barack Obama's hand-picked best and brightest, a man who will never simply be thrown under the bus in an election year like the freshly jettisoned Eric Shinseki? This is no ordinary man but one of mighty power who presides over the national intelligence apparatus, the Big Kahuna who is able to lie to Congress with impunity and as Director of National Intelligence presides over the red, white and blue Orwellian security state that is beyond reproach and despite the damage done by the leaks of patriotic whistleblower Edward Snowden the hyrda is already re-configuring with the sneering, bald head of James Clapper erupting from it's scaled, winged body in all of his hissing, forked-tongue resplendence.

The Obama administration and the United States Government itself is asking all Americans to place their blind faith in the behemoth of the surveillance state as though it were almighty God himself and swallow the tale hook, line and sinker that Snowden lied about ever escalating his concerns through the appropriate channels before performing his act of great service and exposing that the bastards are engaged in mass surveillance, data-mining and Christ only knows what else. Put your faith in James Clapper and others just like him because that is exactly what is being requested by Leviathan.

The inevitable counter-attack against Snowden after his Wednesday night blockbuster interview with the big state ass-kisser and establishment media mouthpiece Brian Williams is on and the NSA is wailing "LIAR" as it has released a lone email from Snowden that it claims is the only one that it can find that provides proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the erstwhile contractor did not adhere to the proper protocol in following the chain of command. While making hay out of Snowden's "I was trained as a spy" statement - which by any reasonable definition of what exactly a "spy" does is true the tactics have shifted. I excerpt the following from ABC News but similar cookie-cutter attacks can be found pretty much everywhere today.

Edward Snowden said in a recent interview he tried to go through internal channels to raise his concerns about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs before he slipped out of the country with a trove of secret documents. The NSA disagrees and says it has the email exchange to prove it.

“I actually did go through channels, and that is documented. The NSA has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of it – legal authorities,” Snowden told NBC News in a wide-ranging interview. “I reported that there were real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities. And I went even further in this, to say that they could be unconstitutional, that they were sort of abrogating our model of government in a way that empowered presidents to override our statutory laws. And this was made very clear. And the response was, more or less, in bureaucratic language, was, ‘You should stop asking questions.’”

In the interview, Snowden called on Congress to verify that the communications exist.

Today the NSA posted online the email exchange to which the government agency says it believes Snowden is referring. The exchange released by the NSA took place in early April, months after Snowden reportedly contacted journalists in preparation to expose the secret programs.

According to the documents posted online, Snowden wrote to the NSA’s Office of General Counsel on Friday, April 5, 2013 asking for legal clarification about whether Presidential executive orders can supersede federal statute, and whether Department of Defense (DOD) or Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) regulations get “greater precedence.”

The response from the General Counsel’s office, dated Monday, April 8, says that while executive orders have the “force and effect of law,” they cannot override a statute. The response also said that DOD and ODNI regulations are afforded “similar precedence” and one may have more depending on subject matter or date. The respondent invites Snowden to “give [him or her] a call if [he] would like to discuss further.”

The NSA said in statement that Snowden’s email “did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed.”

“There was no additional follow-up noted,” the NSA said. “There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations. We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims.”

For what it's worth which isn't much in the treacherous US state media Snowden offered a rebuttal to the NSA's Sgt. Schultz "I know nothing" treatment of his attempt to bring the actions of the run amok American Stasi to light but really, the man has already been judged in NBC's kangaroo court by the set for life power suckler Brian Williams. I just did a quick Google search and every fake media and opinion outlet from "conservative" to "liberal" is running with the Snowden lied narrative. 

Who are you going to believe?

First off anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation knows that reporting any type of malfeasance through the "appropriate channels" is bullshit and that human resources departments exist solely to protect the interests of upper management, functioning as a de facto sort of Gestapo in ensuring that valid complaints are quashed and that those making them are punished and usually escorted out of the building. To believe that this would NOT be the practice in the climes of big government and especially American taxpayer dollar devouring leeches like national security contractors is asinine. One wonders just how fucking dumb that the American sheeple are to constantly gobble down the bullshit biscuits fed to them by their corrupt government and it's media propaganda machine - I mean do any of them actually bother to use logic by applying the same rules that their employers use writ large? Not that I would expect any sort of an  answer to that one after the last thirteen and a half years of living as a peasant in  The Homeland under constant surveillance. Americans just line up to salute whatever horseshit that is run up the flagpole by their benevolent leaders. 

The late, great Hunter S. Thompson had it right in his short diatribe "Hey Rube":

“Hey, Rube” is an old-timey phrase, coined in the merciless culture of the traveling carnival gangs that roamed from town to town in the early 20^th century.

Every stop on the circuit was just another chance to fleece another crowd of free-spending Rubes – Suckers, Hicks, Yokels, Johns, Fish, Marks, Bums, Losers, Day Traders in Portland, fools who buy diamonds from gypsies, and anyone over the age of nine in this country who still believes in his heart that all cops are honest and would never lie in a courtroom.

These people are everywhere. They are Legion, soon to be a majority, and 10,000 more are being born every day. It was P.T. Barnum, the Circus man, who explained the real secret of his vast commercial success by repeating his now-famous motto, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” in this country, ahd his job was to keep them amused, with a zeal that has never been equaled in the history of American show business.

Barnum knew what people wanted: Freaks, Clowns, and Wild Animals. The Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town only once a year, and those days were marked as sacred holidays on the John Deere calendars of every Rube in America…. Those dates were special; many schools closed when the Circus came to town, and not every student returned when the public frenzy was over. “Running away with the Circus” was the dream of every schoolboy and the nightmare of every mother with a bored and beautiful daughter. 

Whoever believes the official government fairy tales on Snowden, whether it be that he is a liar, a low level hacker, a narcissist (like Obama), a man living in a James Bond-Jason Bourne style fantasy world or a Chinese-Russian agent is a sucker and a chump and one who should wise up before it is too late. Unfortunately such types breed like rabbits here in the land of the sheep and the home of the slaves.

Clapper is only the figurehead, the barker outside of the geek tent at the local fair selling tickets to the feces eating context but he represents the US establishment itself - just go to Photoshop and cut and paste any of their heads onto his body, they are all the same beneath the surface. 

Hey Rube, wanna hear something......

High Crimes and Hogwash

President Barack Obama just did what he does best which is to piss down the backs of Americans and tell them that it is raining. Fresh off one hell of a week of his spree of smacking close associates of the newest "New Hitler" Vladimir Putin with sanctions, hyping the Russian military presence on the border of Ukraine as though were the Wehrmacht itself and for good measure kicking the Russians out of G8 our vainglorious leader shifted to the NSA.  With much pomp and circumstance Obama has proposed ending the bulk collection of telephone data by the government with a yet to be explained set of "reforms" to the existing electronic dragnet. In a statement that bordered on sheer parody El Presidente spoke of winning back trust over the now fully integrated massive surveillance machine which he and his Democratic party water carriers and legions of authoritarian right-wing hacks have so ardently defended despite the flagrantly un-American and illegal nature of the programs. 

It is a lie of course. The phone metadata is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg and Obama and the rest of the criminals in Congress would make that deal in a second to “end” it all and start to close the lid on the Pandora's Box of high crimes and misdemeanors that former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden threw open. What Americans should be really concerned about though is that they are collecting content as well, note the recent story that the NSA was recording all calls in an unnamed country (more than likely numerous countries including this one) for future retrieval and playback. Welcome to Precrime with the "crime" as yet to be defined by the corrupt gangster state that has taken root in The Homeland. The metadata is just a pea in the shell game and what is really the problem is the content. What about the emails, webcam videos, purchase transactions, financial information, political affiliations, three hop relational query results etc. The NSA and other intelligence services both foreign and domestic as well as their millions strong army of top secret clearance carrying contractors employed within the surveillance state Gomorrah are collecting it all.

This latest new way of doing things is just more of Obama’s standard horseshit, just like all of that false hope and chump change that the Teflon coated snake oil salesman peddled during his initial run for office. He is lying as surely as Bill Clinton did when wiggling his finger in the faces of Americans and denying having had “sex” with that woman or George W. Bush about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction or Poppy about "read my lips". But the game is rigged, none of the hypocritical asshole Republicans will call him on it either nor has any of this NSA surveillance ever ended up as the subject of one of Darrell Issa's grand inquisitions. The GOP and the demographics that they pander to despite their parroting of the talking points actually love big government when it comes to war, passing laws to discriminate and the use of the police state to spy upon and punish their long list of enemies. They choose instead to wage doomed rushes at windmills like exposing Obamacare as a some communist form of conquest replete with “death panels” or squealing like stuck pigs about the Benghazi hoax. The man’s head is on the block here with these high crimes over the NSA unconstitutional spying and none of those rotten chickenshit bastards will wield the ax. That shows exactly how far that we have descended into the trench of a star-spangled banana republic populated largely by liars, idiots, Jesus freaks and lemmings. The real regime change needs to take place in Washington and it needs to be a complete enema of the entire fucking system that does not discriminate between the asinine my team vs your team ongoing scrum between Team Red Elephant and Team Blue Jackass that keeps the rest of Americans on the sidelines.

The puffy, squawking degenerate who is gerrymandered into East Lansing as snug as a blood-sucking tick has his own bill to “reform” the NSA and guess what? It is just one more step closer to full blown fascism. This guy will never be satisfied until everyone in America is under constant surveillance and just whiling away their time until the black vans roll. People in Mr. Roger’s neighborhood, the Eighth Congressional district in Michigan have been sticking it to the rest America for over fourteen years now and will surely return this sick pathological liar to office once again in November.  It would be too much to ask the high-rolling America haters who are Congressman Rogers’ actual constituents to actually stand up for what is right for the country instead of their own selfish asses and hit the flush button on this turd, not only from office but more importantly from his exalted position of Grand Poobah of the House Intelligence Committee.

Rogers’ malodorous bill with the obligatory Orwellian name of the “End Bulk Collection Act is being foisted off as a “bi-partisan” effort being that it is co-sponsored by Democratic party Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland. What is conveniently left out is that good ole Dutch happens to preside over the very district that includes the Fort Meade headquarters of the NSA Stasi, a hive of scum and villainy if there ever were one. Note that the only time that true “bipartisanship” occurs is when it comes to sticking an ungreased broomstick up the asses of powerless Americans  and then breaking it off.  The very act that a man like Mike Rogers is able to lord it over the entire country with only the true backing of a minuscule fraction of the national population to whom he delivers the bacon calls into question the very concept of American democracy itself. As the legendary  H.L. Mencken once put it: “Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven” and the thorough collapse of the American political system as a functional entity shows the wisdom of his words. We currently reside in a land where the scum has truly risen and where 49 percent of the populace could be stripped of all of their rights, property and liberty by 51 percent – of whom are primarily the same sort of low-information, mean-spirited, bigoted dumbasses who send forth miscreants like Mike Rogers as their local warlord to shit upon the tens of millions of voters who had absolutely no say so in the matter. Just stick a fork in the ass of American "democracy", at the end it is truly not much more legitimate than the un-elected gaggle of rabble that was just installed in Ukraine.  The obvious blind spot of such a concept is that it fails to account for either a thoroughly corrupt political class nor a population that is to be kind largely comprised of willfully ignorant slobs whose idea of “democracy” is Dancing With the Stars or American Idol. 

We get the government that we deserve.

WA-PO Fascists Rush to Defend Unconstitutional NSA Spy Programs

Organized opposition to the reigning in of the NSA Stasi was preordained and the usual suspects being neoconservative warmongers with zero respect for either the Constitution nor any concept of an America that is not on a permanent war footing are squealing like stuck pigs. With the reverberations to this week’s ruling by Federal Judge Richard Leon that only one of the myriad NSA programs  being the metadata gathering and storing for as yet to be revealed mysterious future use of bulk telephone records of millions was “Orwellian” and “likely unconstitutional” and then the tepid (but better than nothing) report of Obama’s NSA review panel beginning to finally batter the Stasi at Fort Meade the pitched defense has begun. The front lines of the war for public opinion are of course the D.C. neocon propaganda beacon that is The Washington Post. Not that the paper doesn't publish the occasional piece of excellent journalism, Barton Gellman has reported on the NSA casting the rogue intelligence operation in a considerably less favorable light than his colleagues in the teeming snakepit of an editorial section and Dana Priest has also has outstanding work to her credit like the Top Secret America series. However in the sewer that is the Washington beltway the paper is the preeminent news source although the cheesy tabloid style Politico is closing ground.

Today’s WaPo alone features a veritable holiday stocking bursting at the seams with fear-mongering, a prominently featured column, a joint effort led by former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey parses a boatload of legalistic bullshit in order to discredit Leon’s ruling – you have to give it to Mukasey, at least he is consistent in his contempt for the Constitution. The piece ends with the standard lie that turning America into a fascist police state is necessary to keep the sheep safe: “Most Americans willingly accept less privacy in exchange for the conveniences the Internet makes possible. But Leon’s analysis means that U.S. intelligence agencies cannot protect Americans from foreign threats using the same analytical tools that private companies employ”.  And any column that starts off with the following just cannot be taken seriously:

“A federal judge’s ruling Monday that the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) bulk telephone metadata collection is “likely” unconstitutional is wrong on the law and the facts. It conflicts with the opinions of 15 other federal judges who have sat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and approved the NSA’s metadata collection 35 times since 2006.”

The FISA court of course is a secret court where there is no representation present from civil liberties advocates nor attorneys arguing the opposite side. It is what it is, an official rubber stamp on the ever growing expansion of the government’s power to control the lives of the citizenry. It takes a real legal contortionist to pull some bizarre interpretation of the Constitution out of his ass that supports the existence of secret courts, this is truly a man who would be in good company in the service of Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin’s NKVD.  But that is what the neocons have always been about, using the memes of the foreign menace to cloak the real threat to Americans which is the fascist bent of our very own government and the revolving door of fifth-columnists the likes of Mukasey who like termites have spent decade gnawing away at our cherished freedoms. Complementing the neocon former A.G. is the always reliable shill for the PNAC/Clean Break manifestos of the eternal Middle Eastern war that is Jennifer Rubin, a propagandist as loathsome as she is prolific.

Rubin, when she isn't openly lying she is smearing libertarians, embracing Obama whenever his policies and statements are steeped in the rebooting of the Cold War and backing up swine like Mukasey with drivel like this vomit inducing bit "The NSA review report should be tossed in the trash" in which she refers to a "pre 9/11 mindset" and backs Mukasey's defense of the secret FISA court that is not included within the U.S. Constitution from which I excerpt:

The House and Senate intelligence committee chairmen also will be highly skeptical of the report. In a curt statement, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) already declared, “Though I am still studying the details, I have serious concerns with some of the report’s 46 recommendations. Any intelligence collection reforms must be careful to preserve important national security capabilities. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Congress to enact meaningful reforms in the near future.”

Like Rogers, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has been a responsible defender of the NSA program. In response to the much-criticized district court ruling holding the program unconstitutional, she issued a detailed rebuttal pointing out that the ruling “differs from those of at least 15 separate federal district court judges who sit, or have sat, on the FISA Court and have reauthorized the program every 90 days — a total 35 times in all” as well as another district court judge from California. After pointing out that the Supreme Court will have the final say, she noted, “Those of us who support the call records program do so with a sincere belief that it, along with other programs, is constitutional and helps keep the country safe from attack. I believe the program can benefit from additional transparency and privacy protections — including additional public reporting and added court review provisions which were recently adopted by the Senate Intelligence Committee in the bipartisan FISA Improvements Act.”

There you have it, any column that not only defends secret courts but also hard core and corrupt fascists who use their plum congressional committee chair positions to wage war against the American people cannot be taken seriously.

While the NSA is defended the insipid Charles Kraüthammer wages a rearguard attack on – groan – Obamacare, the massive corporate scam that has deftly been repackaged as a Bircheresque communist takeover of America by longtime, well paid propagandists looking to rouse the rabble for a 2014 storming of the polls. Obamacare sucks, has been falsely sold as healthcare reform when it is nothing but a taxpayer subsidized gift to the parasitic insurance industry and has provided greedy corporations with the perfect opportunity to jettison those inconvenient drags on annual executive bonus amounts that are employee dependents. Only in a country as dumbed down as this one does this pass for communism, socialism or Marxism when it is what it is and that is fascism – a merger of corporate and state power, just like the ongoing government support of financial markets with 85 billion a month in free gambling money to Wall Street casinos. That all three systems do nothing but redistribute wealth to a corrupt, entrenched elite with varying degrees of the use of state power against those not connected is rarely if ever noted. But Kraüthammer has bills to pay too so the flogging of the dead horse continues and I have yet to see the sleazy bastard critique the loss of civil liberties under the rogue surveillance machine run by the NSA.

The Washington Post has long been one of the most sordid sources of big state propaganda in the land and has for too long been able to live off of the laurels of the Watergate reportage that led to the downfall of Richard M. Nixon. It was former publisher Philip Graham who was recruited by the CIA's Frank Wisner for Operation Mockingbird the agency's prototype program to transform media into state propaganda organs. The WaPo's legacy of collaborating with the deep state intelligence agencies will continue as the torch is now passed to the new owner, Amazon's Jeff Bezos who has sealed a $600 million deal to provide the CIA with cloud services.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

60 Minutes NSA Puff Piece is Another Black Eye for CBS

While it would be rational to believe that CBS and especially the vaunted 60 Minutes franchise would use a bit of discretion after the now infamous fraudulent Benghazi story affixed an indeliable blight upon the network less than two months ago the network is now having to do damage control on another self-inflicted wound. On Sunday night in a two-segment puff piece that basically amounted to an infomercial for the rogue NSA, an agency that only yesterday was found by a federal judge to be conducting programs that are likely unconstitutional CBS set a new standard for state propaganda. The segment provided General Keith Alexander with a national forum to dissemble, obfuscate and engage in fear-mongering without having any sort of adversarial stance or input allowed from civil liberties or privacy groups. Worse yet the 60 Minutes story conducted by interviewer John Miller who is a man who formerly worked in the office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) which is the same agency that pathological liar James Clapper heads up. CBS boasted that Miller was the "ultimate insider" which is ironically true but the network that is now hemorrhaging credibility didn't bother to consider that Miller has a serious conflict of interest problem and that his "ultimate insider" status actually calls into question his sympathies for the unconstitutional programs as well as his objectivity.

For all intents and purposes John Miller might as well have been Dylan Davies/Sergeant Morgan Jones because when it all comes down to a so-called journalist providing a national forum for yet another liar with an agenda. Granted that Lara Logan's self-immolation over a mercenary who just happened to have a (likely ghost written) book being peddled by a CBS publishing subsidiary never should have aired given the poor vetting and lack of accountability but didn't the network learn anything? After all, there was outside of the notorious crank Senator Lindsey Graham was widely derided and the network had to not only issue a public apology but recall the book in question. 60 Minutes, really the skeletal remains of what used to be one hell of a good news show before the corporate arm of the company began meddling in the news division should have been far more careful after the Embassy House fiasco. The NSA infomercial now threatens to become an even bigger blot on 60 Minutes and while the competition is pretty close Miller's "ultimate insider" piece may turn out to be a corrupt state-corporate media outlet's magnum opus of bullshit.

The criticism was practically pouring in before the final credits rolled and this morning the piling on has begun. Today there are stories from diverse websites/media outlets such as The Guardian: "NSA goes on 60 Minutes: the definitive facts behind CBS's flawed report", liberal weekly The Nation: "The Sad Decline of ‘60 Minutes’ Continues With This Week’s NSA Whitewash", tech journal PC Magazine: "NSA's Snowden Snow Job on 60 Minutes Reveals Nothing New", website Mediate: "Journalists Rip Apart 60 Minutes for ‘Embarrassing’ and Uncritical NSA Report",  at the liberal blog Firedog Lake "NSA-Approved Propaganda: ’60 Minutes’ & the Revolving Door Journalism of John Miller", firebrand Alex Jones' Infowars "NSA Director Alexander Has to Ask Permission to Answer a Question" and the ultra-conservative website Newsmax: "Greenwald, Others Denounce CBS "60 Minutes' Story on NSA". I have yet to see much if any such sentiment in the 'mainstream' media but it is still early.

Monday's court ruling by Judge Richard Leon on the unconstitutionality of the NSA telephone surveillance program -which will be fought hammer and tong by the Eric Holder Justice Department and the rest of the criminal government and it's tentacles - brings up a very serious question. With the massive violations of the constitution that have been piling up on NSA activities and the yet undisclosed stuff that is going to make what we already know look like petty crime is it not proper to begin to bestow upon General Alexander, James Clapper, Senator Feinstein, Congressman Mike Rogers and the rest of the defenders of unconstitutional, unlawful activities by the moniker that they really deserve which would be criminals? It should also be pointed out that the media which has fully enabled the criminality would also be guilty just as it should be for the war crimes associated with the unprovoked and illegal attack on Iraq and the subsequent torture and murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher stood alongside the rest of the war criminals at Nuremberg where he was found guilty of crimes against humanity for it was his contribution to the national mindset that led to carnage and destruction, should there not be similar standards applied to those in the corporate-state media if the day ever comes where there is a restoration of the law in The Homeland?

It Was Inevitable: The NSA is Trolling for Porn Too

With the ever-expanding list of NSA abuses piling up by the week was there ever truly any doubt that it wouldn’t come to light that the American Stasi has been involved in the perusal of pornography?  In the latest revelation to be gleaned from the documents of former Booz Allen contractor Edward Snowden a story has broken that Commandant Keith Alexander’s finest have been trolling through the porn habits of suspected “radicalizers” to accumulate potentially embarrassing information.  While the usual sanctimonious horse crap is spewed by big government mouthpieces that the rogue agency "uses all of the lawful tools at our disposal to impede the efforts of valid terrorist targets who seek to harm the nation and radicalize others to violence" rest assured that this is in no way limited to a handful of Muslim rabble rousers.  I have maintained that the really bad information on NSA surveillance are yet to break and involve a number of other sordid uses of the high tech surveillance machine, one of which would be the sexual blackmail of public officials.

The article that outed the taxpayer funded porno surfing is written by former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and other contributors and offers up the historical context that is so often missing from any other form of reportage in the lamentable state-corporate media. I excerpt from the piece which was published by the liberal website Huffington Post:

Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI harassed activists and compiled secret files on political leaders, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. The extent of the FBI's surveillance of political figures is still being revealed to this day, as the bureau releases the long dossiers it compiled on certain people in response to Freedom of Information Act requests following their deaths. The information collected by the FBI often centered on sex -- homosexuality was an ongoing obsession on Hoover's watch -- and information about extramarital affairs was reportedly used to blackmail politicians into fulfilling the bureau's needs.

Current FBI Director James Comey recently ordered new FBI agents to visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington to understand "the dangers in becoming untethered to oversight and accountability."

James Bamford, a journalist who has been covering the NSA since the early 1980s, said the use of surveillance to exploit embarrassing private behavior is precisely what led to past U.S. surveillance scandals. "The NSA's operation is eerily similar to the FBI's operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to 'neutralize' their targets," he said. "Back then, the idea was developed by the longest serving FBI chief in U.S. history, today it was suggested by the longest serving NSA chief in U.S. history."

That controversy, Bamford said, also involved the NSA. "And back then, the NSA was also used to do the eavesdropping on King and others through its Operation Minaret. A later review declared the NSA’s program 'disreputable if not outright illegal,'" he said.

History, which most Americans have neither the time nor respect for unless it is wrapped up in tired and fallacious regurgitating of World War II aka ‘the good war’ analogies contains much precedent when it comes to the myriad abuses against that citizenry by intelligence agencies.  In the past, back when we still had a somewhat functional system of checks and balance and a populace that was better informed instead of the intellectually bereft collection of television watching thumb-suckers that exist today there were at times serious attempts to reign in abuses. For example there was  The  Church Committee which in the aftermath of the twin debacles of Watergate and Vietnam responded to the fiendish actions of the administration of the paranoid Richard M. Nixon sought to institute control over the CIA, NSA and FBI’s cowboy activities. Mr. Church, a Democratic party senator from Idaho on a 1975 episode of a pre-David Gregory Meet the Press stated that:

In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.

If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. 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 over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

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It is an earlier variation of Edward Snowden’s statement about why he was leaking all of the insider information that he took from the NSA and "turnkey tyranny":

And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse, until eventually there will be a time where policies will change, because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law. And because of that, a new leader will be elected, they’ll flip the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it, and it’ll be turnkey tyranny.

It should be noted that another member of the Church Committee was Mr. Conservative himself Barry Goldwater which shows that in the past there used to be legitimate bipartisan concern in Congress about protecting the Constitutional rights and civil liberties of Americans. Today we have scum the likes of Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein who abuse their committee chairperson positions to further cement the fascist infrastructure of the surveillance/police state in place. This is by no means limited to the revealed “radicalizers” rest assured that the internet browsing of adult sites (porn) are being compiled and catalogued in Bluffdale, Utah for some yet to be defined future purpose.  Hey, as a libertarian I personally believe that the sexual activities and fantasies of ALL Americans are not a matter that the government should be snooping into.  The only sexual activities and internet activity that should be subject to monitoring is that of child molesters/sexual predators as these filthy degenerates  have no place in any sort of decent society and even this should be subject to warrants and courts other than the secret ones that currently exists.

This latest revelation opens the door to sexual blackmail of elected officials as well as honey traps that would put such individuals in a position of compromise.  For a few examples look at Elliot Spitzer or Anthony Weiner or Louisiana Senator David Vitter the diaper wearing client of the D.C. Madame who unlike the others is still an influential member of the Senate which given his exposure as a pervert should have relegated him to a career outside of where his potential blackmail would affect policy. Blackmail and extortion have always been instrumental to politics but never in history has the might of a high-tech surveillance machine the likes of which has never been seen on earth been allowed to operate with the complete degree of impunity that this monstrosity does.

It would be wise to take very seriously the ongoing revelations of the NSA Stasi as well as to think very seriously about how Mr. Snowden and decades earlier Senator Church have effectively put this into the context necessary so as to illustrate the danger to all of us.