NSA Friendly Judge Sucker Punches Microsoft in Email Privacy Ruling

The lasting damage inflicted upon American tech companies by the out of control NSA surveillance machine never gets the attention that it deserves. While the ongoing trashing of civil liberties, the gutting of the constitution and the complete elimination of all rights to privacy have turned this once great country into a borderline totalitarian state, the effects of government spying have been nothing short of devastating to business. The inability to protect privacy along with the ongoing NSA efforts to crack encryption and lack of NSA oversight are putting American business at a long-term competitive disadvantage. Once there has been sufficient development of systems in other countries that offer a degree of protection for consumers and laws that protect them from warrantless bulk data collection there will be an exodus that will only further damage an already reeling economy. The leaders of the big tech corporations get this too. They have appealed to President Barack Obama to reign in his renegade American Stasi on more than one occasion. Yet the machine only becomes more deeply entrenched in a protected position from accountability.

The latest blow to American big tech comes courtesy of  U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska who has ruled that Microsoft must surrender customer emails stored on a server in Ireland. Microsoft had fought a warrant on the basis that the overseas subsidiary was outside of the country and therefore not subject to the demands of U.S. authorities. The Redmond, WA based company has no doubt incurred the ire of the Obama regime and the national surveillance state by openly and defiantly challenging National Security Letters (NSL). Microsoft is a corporation with the resources, brand name clout and army of lawyers that can actually fight back against Leviathan. They recently won a battle with the FBI over an NSL, putting a huge bug up the ass of Eric Holder at the Justice Department. As Reuters reports in a story entitled "Microsoft ordered by U.S. judge to submit customer's emails from abroad":

Microsoft Corp must turn over a customer's emails and other account information stored in a data center in Ireland to the U.S. government, a judge ruled on Thursday, in a case that has drawn concern from privacy groups and major technology companies.

Microsoft and other U.S. companies had challenged the warrant, arguing it improperly extended the authority of federal prosecutors to seize customer information held in foreign countries.

Following a two-hour court hearing in New York, U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska said a search warrant approved by a federal magistrate judge required the company to hand over any data it controlled, regardless of where it was stored.

"It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information," Preska said.

The emails were classified not as private communications by the Obama regime but as "business records" which are subject to government confiscation under that most anti-American of laws that is the USAPATRIOT Act. The law was crammed down the throats of fear-stricken Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 with zero debate. The U.S.Congress completely rolled over despite a transformational law contradictory to the very nature of a free society. The law was originally given a sunset provision which in a rational country would be simply allowed to expire after the state of emergency. But here in what used to be the "land of the free and the home of the brave" the renewals keep coming as does the legal chicanery from the executive branch that further cement fascism firmly into place within the American judicial system.

This is the way that it now works in The Homeland. When a judge rules against the intrusions of the feds as happened back in December when Federal judge Richard Leon ruled that the NSA bulk collection of telephone records was likely "unconstitutional" and definitely "Orwellian" it isn't allowed to stand.  The usual defenders of the national surveillance state including Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey threw a tantrum and the very next week in another court, an NSA friendly verdict was declared. Judge William Pauley effectively nullified Leon's ruling by declaring such surveillance to be perfectly legal and in doing so erected a veritable firewall against the spying power of big government.

Microsoft ran into that firewall on Thursday showing that the preservation of the critical social control programs of the U.S. government along with the ability to protect the criminals in high places trumps the long-term benefits of American tech corporations.

Microsoft has issued a statement that the ruling will be appealed. It's time for big tech to unify and lawyer up because it is going to take a lot of money and effort to fight what is a corrupt and rigged system.

NSA Collecting Far More Info on Non-Targets per WAPO Story

According to a new story based on documents obtained by former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden there are vastly more innocent victims of mass surveillance than acknowledged. The story broken by The Washington Post and written by Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman along with Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani reports that 90 percent of of those whose data was collected - at least according to this sample being analyzed- were not legitimate targets of the spying but rather they were innocent internet users both domestically and abroad. The sample is described as "roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts" which shows that the numbers of the ballyhooed just released PCLOB "independent" executive branch report are total bullshit.

The is entitled "In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are"   states that:

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

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

Not that this is news, despite the ongoing denials from the government and from President Barack Obama himself only chumps and suckers would take anything that these people say at face value given the level of systemic corruption and their history of fibbing but when such a story does run - especially within the state-corporate media it is evidence that the powers that be (TPTB) even can see the slow awakening to their arrogance, incompetence and criminality.

The WAPO story goes on to provide multiple examples of those who are caught up in the dragnet collection and states that the extra data not target related as:

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.

And in one section describes the information collected as:

… medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.

Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.

Despite the ongoing denials and obstruction tactic of continuing to insist that the NSA is only collecting "metadata" the WAPO story makes it evident that content is not only being collected but stored. Where the story doesn't go, and perhaps the drip, drip, drip nature of these revelations may eventually lead (especially if there is indeed a second NSA leaker as has been speculated) is that the additional information can be used for blackmail, intimidation and turning innocent people into government informants - specifically note the reference to pictures of "infants and toddlers in bathtubs" which could be interpreted as being child pornography. Not that I would expect the WAPO to go there and while having a good share of new information it just seems to be more than a bit of a limited hangout in that it doesn't have the real stuff - maybe Glenn Greenwald still will be able to unleash some journalistic shock and awe but after just caving in to to the US government skeptics will always wonder whether that too will be a limited hangout.

There are though other aspects to the Post story that are of particular interest including:

In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach.

Which shows that former NSA Stasi Commandant General Keith Alexander who is  now whoring himself out to Wall Street is as much a liar as DNI James Clapper. Gellman and his fellow reporters go on to point this out:

As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists.

“He didn’t get this data,” Alexander told a New Yorker reporter. “They didn’t touch —”

“The operational data?” the reporter asked.

“They didn’t touch the FISA data,” Alexander replied. He added, “That database, he didn’t have access to.”

It would seem that the information contradicts the good retired general who is either an idiot or full of shit and likely a bit of both. It sure didn't take the man who was at one time the most powerful man in the government if not the world for the sheer reach of his ability to gather information. Information that he is apparently now cashing in on like so many other former high officials who travel through that revolving door from supposed government service to the private sector. Considering that nearly all of this creepy and Orwellian surveillance, data-mining and sick voyeurism as well as the circumventing of the Constitution occurred on his watch if there is ever accountability then he should be the first in line for a life in a prison cell for his crimes against the American people.

Dianne Feinstein Lashes Out While Corrupt Congress Guts NSA Reforms

Apparently having now put her little snit with the CIA behind her, Senate Intelligence Committee boss Dianne Feinstein, the woman who has long served as an impenetrable firewall of cellulite between accountability and the run amok NSA Stasi is back with a vengeance. DiFi, while appearing on the Sunday morning bloviation circuit with CNN's Candy Crowley snapped while discussing the new Glenn Greenwald book "No Place to Hide" that - “It’s not a surveillance program, it’s a data-collection program”. The testy California Senator may have inadvertently let the the cat out of the bag on that one because it IS a data-collection program, specifically a data-mining program conducted on damned near the entire US population and once it has been collected it is being stored for some yet to be defined future use. That future use is to be social control and the best protection that money can buy for a system so vile and corrupt that there really is no adequate terminology to truly describe it.

The data that has been collected will be used to identify political dissidents or troublemakers challenging the imposition of fascism in America. But that is the purpose (outside of the surveillance end which likely includes sexual blackmail of political figures, industrial espionage on a grand scale, money laundering, the manipulation of financial markets and probably even state sanctioned drug trafficking) of what the NSA and the millions of private contractors - to lock down the illicit activities of those in high places when the shit finally does hit the fan and as in all tyrannies the roundup of problem people is a top priority. Criminals like Feinstein fully understand what the programs are for because she is the one charged with oversight which is pretty much like the financial oversight that has been provided by those like Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson - the best and probably oldest scam in the book is to enable corruption by putting a crook or in Feinstein's case, a sociopath with zero morality in charge of minding the store.

Feinstein like the other treasonous swine who have hijacked the country using the September 11, 2001 attacks as an excuse continues to engage in the same fear-mongering to avoid oversight that has been used since Dick Cheney took over the show on that day while Bush was flying around the country like a scared rabbit. DiFi played the "terror" card by saying “I know they will come after us if they can, I see the intelligence” [not bothering to say exactly who "they" are nor that the "intelligence" is cooked to exaggerate such threats and keep the money rolling in] and “Terror is not down in the world, it is up" [failing to mention that the Empire's wars of aggression aren't exactly winning hearts and minds]. Call it what it is but now would be a perfect time for some sort of false flag attack that would forever end scrutiny of the rising menace of the star-spangled totalitarian state before it has finished baking, as the late Hunter S. Thompson put it "paranoia is just another word for ignorance" and nothing should ever be put beyond the capability of the lunatics who are running the system these days.

To the Obama administration and this most detestable of legislatures there has been no bigger thorn in the side than former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Just when the NSA Stasi stories had died down allowing the war machine to turn attention towards backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine and goading Russian leader Vladimir Putin into a response that would trigger a new Cold War - sending arms sales skyrocketing - there is renewed interest. This comes due to the Greenwald book and the surprisingly wide media attention that the author has been getting in The Homeland. There are also, as Greenwald promises more stories to come and soon including that really serious stuff that he has been teasing us with. In his GQ interview "The Man Who Knows Too Much" he made the statement that:

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.

I suspect that Feinstein and her ilk have an inkling about exactly what that "big missing piece" is and while it may not be the smoking gun that nails them all to the wall it may provide a sufficient piece of the puzzle that will provide other journalists, activists and bloggers with the material to begin to tie together a lot of disparate coincidences and strangeness into the damning indictment of criminals in high places that is desperately needed. The scum are likely praying for a terrorist attack - the bigger, the better - right about now.

On the "reform" front things aren't working out so well in terms of transparency and control over the surveillance AND data collection colossus. Predictably the so-called USA FREEDOM Act is being disemboweled by right-wing talk radio bound Michigan Congressmen Mike Rogers and his on the take authoritarian allies.  According to a story in The Hill entitled "Advocates fear NSA bill is being gutted":

Privacy advocates are worried that a bill intended to reform the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) is being watered down before it heads to the House floor.

“Last stage negotiations” between members of the House and the Obama administration could significantly weaken provisions in the NSA bill, people familiar with the discussions say.

“Behind the scenes, there’s some nervousness,” one House aide said.

Earlier this month, the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees came together to approve a compromise version of the USA Freedom Act. That bill, authored by Patriot Act author Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), would scale back many of the sweeping surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden.

To win the support of NSA defenders, lawmakers abandoned some reform provisions in Sensenbrenner’s original bill. One of the major changes was dropping the appointment of a constitutional advocate to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves the NSA’s spying requests, and substituting it for a panel of experts.

The bill was also stripped of language that would have allowed tech companies to publish more specific information about the number and types of government requests for user data they receive.

During Judiciary consideration, an amendment to allow less specific reporting was added back into the bill, but some worry that provision is in danger now because the administration thinks it’s already reached a deal that allows tech companies to publish more information about the NSA requests.

While pro-reform advocacy groups and members hailed the House bill as a positive first step, many lamented the revisions and said the legislation will be in trouble on the floor if it undergoes further changes.

There is a “growing chorus of concern” that the bill that makes it to the floor for a vote could be a less meaningful version of what passed the Judiciary and Intelligence committees with overwhelming bipartisan support, the aide said.

Reform advocates warn they will withdraw their support for the bill if the final version doesn’t pass muster.

The only "muster" that will be passed is that of the status quo as those who have assumed positions of power do not surrender it willingly. The best hope would be for the forthcoming stories from Greenwald and his associates will be sufficiently shocking so as to make the case for not only reform but a movement to dismantle the NSA entirely as the enemy to a free society and affront to the US Constitution that it has become. Trials, convictions and prison sentences for the enablers of this monstrous pox on the planet would be an added bonus.  

Shameless: NSA Data Mining Includes Angry Birds

Nothing is sacred to the NSA Stasi and their Norsefire partners across the pond at GCHQ. In yet another of those very embarrassing revelations that have generated  perverse fantasies among the guilty of the murder of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden the ravenous security state monster is also conducting data-mining operations on cell phone apps including the  extremely popular Angry Birds game series. In a collaborative effort by The Guardian, The New York Times and Pro Publica it was revealed that the Anglo-American surveillance machine has been able to easily and successfully exploit in app advertisements to collect personal private data. Angry Birds, an app that reportedly has been downloaded more than 1.7 billion times globally has been hailed as a “golden nuggets” for the illegal data-mining activities as they seek to “collect it all”. What isn't stated openly in these stories at least as far as I have seen is that the games are very popular among children who are being exploited by these dirty villainous agencies as surely as some garden variety pederast trolling through chat rooms.

Not that the foray into the world of video games is an earth-shattering piece of news, the agency that engages in illegal spying already was outed for infiltrating online games such as World of Warcraft several months ago. Hell, given the level of sophistication and the urge for penetration of every aspect of the personal privacy of millions would it truly be any surprise were the news to break that they even had the capability to use the digital television of millions of law abiding citizens to actually watch them? Where exactly will James Clapper, Michael Hayden, General Keith Alexander and their minions be during this Sunday's Super Bowl broadcast?

The Angry Birds intrusion is yet the latest piece of blatant disregard for the Constitution that Obama’s Stasi ( he defends it, he owns it)  has been caught perpetrating with and as such there is the duty to chronicle it as another one of those road signs along the highway to Hell that keep whipping by at lightning speed. The story of course is given the best coverage in The Guardian (sorry NYT but you helped lie us into the Iraq war)  given the increasingly deplorable descent of the domestic corporate-state media into into the netherworld it is the ultimate irony that freedom loving Americans must now get their news from abroad.  It was just the other day that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell  who as former Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan’s wife is an illustration of how the elite intermingle and breed so to produce a more entitled form of life form than possible to be produced from the rabble. During an interview with former Congresswoman Jane Harman over the NSA abuses Mitchell broke away for a NEWSFLASH of great national import that was the breaking story of manufactured celebrity Justin Bieber’s legal plight. You just cannot make stuff like this up as our once educated society continues the long slow crawl into the fever swamps of Idiocracy, a movie that is among the most potent social critiques of the modern era.

The Guardian story, by James Ball entitled “Angry Birds and ‘leaky’ phone apps targeted by NSA and GCHQ for user data” will likely have little to no affect on the complacent, sheeplike citizens of the star-spangled, god-kissed Homeland. Perhaps the would be some degree of restiveness amongst the bewildered herd but with Andrea Mitchell’s cutaway from matters of serious news to the Bieber Alert serving as ‘Exhibit A’ it does not exactly bode well for that informed public that is critical for a functional democracy and free country. So I excerpt the following from the foreign news source that continues to provide excellent coverage of our ongoing national existential crisis:

GCHQ documents use Angry Birds – reportedly downloaded more than 1.7bn times – as a case study for app data collection.

The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of "leaky" smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users' private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.

The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.

Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.

Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes.

This has zilch to do with preventing terrorism and it is unimaginable to one with any degree of functional gray matter that serious jihadists with a huge ax to grind against western decadence would spend much time playing freaking Angry Birds. This goes more to the NSA’s aforementioned fervor to ‘collect it all’  for storage as a part of some vague future need which would be - and this is not exactly venturing out on a limb here - retroacatively building a case for persecution against dissidents, political opposition and civil liberties advocates who challenge the system in the fairly near future.

The collection of the personal data through these apps will of course be thrown under the umbrella of “metadata” when it comes to defending the legality of the collections yet that is fairly dishonest. The great hidden secret of all of this (or Easter Egg in video game parlance) is that the “metadata” only serves as an indexing system and what is also being collected here is the actual content of phone calls, emails etc. despite the ongoing denials of the national security state mouthpieces including Barack Obama himself. That is the key - that all of this data is going into a massive database (perhaps something along the lines of MAIN CORE) for when the day comes to conduct the Last Roundup. Perhaps some of the real stuff that is out there on these programs, the as yet undisclosed serious stuff may contain details on a program exactly like that. It not as if it hasn’t already been thought of (REX 84) and as we continue to careen towards the inevitable collapse of an unsustainable the lists grow daily. Why do you think that the immense NSA complex in Utah was built?  

It IS happening here. 

(Image: The Guardian) 

If Serious, Republican Interest in Curtailing NSA is a Winner

Let us assume just for the sake of argument that the Republican party’s sudden interest in protecting the privacy of Americans isn’t just a political gimmick. This is after all a political party that has time and again showed that they would be willing to sell their own grandmothers and any serious proposal that comes from this entity should be viewed with extreme skepticism. But the demographics are rapidly changing and the pandering to racists, religious fanatics, cranks and outright idiots is increasingly becoming not only a recipe for losing elections but for becoming a shrinking, southern based permanent minority that can only survive by changing the laws to suppress voting and that can't last forever. The culture wars are over or to put it more succinctly they have shifted over to the Democrats with their ongoing concealment of the moral bankruptcy of their own party by focusing on using the government to address the grievances of many identity based groups with crusades for the legalization of same sex marriage and preserving women’s reproductive rights. The Republicans reliably ruled on these very issues and used them to muster the loyal shocktroops come election day but times change – we should all be very happy that the GOP lost the culture wars because they provided a cover to avoid addressing very real and serious issues and created a political vacuum that was rapidly filled by corruption.

With the announcement that Republican National Committee (RNC) has adopted a resolution to investigate the out of control and unconstitutional NSA programs, formally titled  “Resolution To Renounce The National Security Agency’s Surveillance Program” the party has finally taken a big step back towards relevance. That is if it is not just playing politics which it usually is with this group and it is an interesting bit of hypocrisy that none of these programs which were being used during the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney administration and did not elicit any such consideration. Barack Obama did inherit the NSA Stasi but instead of bringing about reforms and the promised “transparency” he doubled-down, just gave a major speech defending the ongoing Orwellian operations and his administration is denouncing Thursday’s report by the government’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. It was also reported by beltway ‘Inside Baseball’ rag Politico that the administration also  believed that the surveillance review report produced by Obama's own hand picked panel was too – gasp –“liberal” and sided with guardians of the NSA illegal surveillance programs.

The Politico piece, citing University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone one of the five members of the The President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology that recommended changes to NSA programs that Obama is going to ignore states:

A member of President Barack Obama’s hand-picked surveillance review group said Friday the White House was swayed by U.S. intelligence officials sympathetic to the National Security Agency and ultimately viewed the group’s findings “as a liberal report.”

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone said that, after receiving the surveillance group’s report, Obama spent a month meeting “with many of the same people we had met with at great length, members of the intelligence community, members of the intelligence committees from Congress largely on one side of the picture.”

“And instead of our report being truly understood as a middle ground, based upon taking into account all of those perspectives on both sides of the spectrum, I think the White House got moved by thinking of our report as a liberal report,” Stone said.

Stone, speaking during a panel discussion at the National Press Club in Washington, said intelligence officials were “pushing [Obama] and the White House generally more to what we can call the right.”

So once again Obama the narcissist, ever conscious of his precious legacy has chosen political calculus over doing what is necessary to protect the constitutional rights of the American people. Having already sold out to Wall Street gamblers who need $85 billion dollars a month pumped into their gambling casinos just to stave off another too big to fail megabank implosion, to the parasitical insurance industry with the corporate giveaway that is Obamacare, ending the wars in a real manner not concealed by smoke and mirrors and now the NSA the man is every bit the criminal that Bush ever was. Now he and his Democratic party hacks have done the exact one thing that any savvy politician, businessperson and warrior would never do - give your enemy the knife with which they will cut your own throat. These oppressive big government surveillance programs are now owned by Obama and if the GOP is serious in opposing them they would now have the most ass-kicking club in the bag going into the 2014 and 2016 elections.

I remain a skeptic on all of this though, especially when considering that the GOP is the party of Karl Rove, Roger Ailes, Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee,Sarah Palin and Reince Priebus and that it contains some of the biggest warmongers on the planet, notably bloodthirsty Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. RNC opposition to the NSA Stasi will also run afoul of the two most prominent television friendly shills for the fascist surveillance state in Representatives Peter King and Mike Rogers so this is going to be quite an interesting show and can only accelerate the ongoing inner party conflict between libertarians such as Rand Paul and Justin Amash and the corrupt warmongering establishment that now is interchangeable with the Obama regime.

I recently wrote a post citing a Financial Times story on the rise of libertarian ideals with younger Americans who are turned off by the culture wars of old and business as usual.  Now a smart political party with an eye on the future would use this opportunity to capitalize on American anger at the NSA excesses, purge the corrupt establishment and begin to run solely on reinstating the rule of law as well as beginning to restore the Constitution. Whether the GOP is that smart remains to be seen but a major party opposing the post September 11, 2001 doppelganger of what used to be at least theoretically a free country could provide just the type of vehicle that Americans need to roll back the National Security State. 

Return of “the Decider” - Obama Disagrees With Privacy Board Report

Former U.S. President George W. Bush was widely mocked for his now infamous utterance in the course of defending Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -  "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best". Bush passed into history as one of the least popular and disastrous leaders in American history but now his once immensely popular successor, Barack Obama is giving the man a run for his money.  Obviously more than a bit miffed over Thursday’s bombshell report by the report released by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board rebutting Obama’s ongoing defense of the indefensible the current occupant of the White House bristled, disagreeing with the report. Delivering the message through chief flack Jay Carney (a paid liar) our great leader, sold to a gullible public as a constitutional law professor demonstrated that he has just as much actual reverence for the principles expressed in that document as his predecessor (“a goddamned piece of paper”) with the following:“On the issue of [Section] 215, we simply disagree with the board’s analysis on the legality of the program”. So there we have it, the return of the unaccountable unitary executive but you could say that he never really left.

The specters of Bush and Cheney have hovered over the Obama administration since day one, the NSA programs, especially the data-mining and storage of metadata (which is an index to actual content) all a part of a tragic enabling act that was urgently pushed through a supine Congress while the scent of rotting flesh still hung in the lower Manhattan air after 9/11. The USA PATRIOT Act laid the foundation for the final implementation of the surveillance/police state as well as punched our collective ticket to demise as our once vibrant democracy and system of checks and balances were reduced to wreckage much as the twin towers themselves.  Wars were started, the NSA snooping and compiling of the most intimate details of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans picked up steam and the public was mentally bludgeoned into accepting their own eventual enslavement by a government gone rogue through the greatest mind control device known to mankind, their televisions. For years Republicans had a chokehold on the political system fueled by keeping the befuddled masses in a state of constant dread thanks to regular ‘terrorist’ alerts as well as a color coded threat level matrix that was used largely at times for political gain.

Americans saw that the Bush-Cheney regime had overstepped their bounds and done so badly so in 2008 they put their faith into a young Senator from Illinois who promised hope and change as well as transparency and voted Barack Obama into office. Now in the first year of his second term Obama has not only failed to provide the promised transparency but has become one of the greatest defenders of the secret state, secret courts and the massive and illegal surveillance colossus that holds it all together. Never has one man failed so many and the rejection of Thursday’s report by his rotten administration is just the latest example that he has been fully assimilated by the corrupt system, that is if he wasn’t just being a politician and lying his ass off about everything in the first place.

With Barry and the boys now firmly in control with three years to go and not having to worry about being re-elected the mask is now off and Americans will just have deal with having to finance their own government spying on them. Obama is on record as being committed to only the most meager and vague cosmetic changes to the NSA Stasi’s compiling their electronic dossiers for the day when the order comes to deal with the troublemakers, only they will by then be called “terrorists”, as Hermann Goering once famously summed it up: “It works the same way in any country.” But Obama is doing immense and irreparable damage to liberalism itself, not the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News/John Bircher definition but the classic concept itself. Never one to shy away from scathing broadsides delivered to hypocrites libertarian Justin Raimondo weighs in today at Antiwar.com in his column “The Snowden Effect and the Liberal Implosion” from which I excerpt:

We haven’t seen anything like this since the Vietnam war era: an administration caught red-handed illegally and systematically spying on Americans in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war. At that time, too, the political class was badly divided, with the hard-liners circling their wagons against the rising tide of popular outrage and the dissenters auguring a new and not-so-Silent Majority.

AND –

With the news that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has handed in a report declaring the National Security Agency’s meta-data dragnet flat out illegal it is clear that Edward Snowden’s revelations have badly split a political class that was once pretty much united in its fulsome support for the national security status quo. This comes on the heels of a new poll that shows the majority of Americans oppose the NSA’s data dragnet – with an even larger majority contending that the main danger to their welfare is their own government.

AND –

We saw this Janus-faced persona in Obama’s mien as he campaigned against the Bush administration’s overreach in the Middle East – and then tried to pull a fast one in Syria, a scheme nixed by an outbreak of popular outrage. We saw it as he looked us straight in the eye and told us his is the most transparent administration in modern times – and then did nothing when his Director of National Intelligence denied collecting data on American citizens and was exposed as a liar practically the next day.

Power as we have been made so painfully aware of in the era after “the day that changed everything” is corrosive and corrupting, it can be said that only the worst are attracted to it. Obama’s defense of the ongoing disemboweling of the Constitution shows that power will do everything to not only erect systems of totalitarianism to protect it and those who finance the corrupt politicians make the laws but that will destroy whatever vestiges of the America that existed on September 10, 2001 to ensure that it is never threatened by the rabble.

The most damning part of our rapidly collapsing society is that the same ‘liberals’ who decried all of the abuses of Bush and Cheney in a full-throated roar are now lining up behind Obama as he continues to lead the march to the gates of Hell itself.

After Obama’s Big Speech NSA Programs are Still Illegal

The latest blow to the ongoing national disgrace of unconstitutional mass surveillance that is being conducted with zero oversight by the NSA came Thursday morning. The government’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board released a report that confirms what any rational, thinking American who is not in the bag for big surveillance already knew: that the NSA programs to collect phone metadata are illegal. Not that this is a big deal to President Barack Obama who is still riding high after basically telling everyone to go to hell in his overly hyped speech last Friday at the Justice Department. It was a real stem-winder filled with obfuscations, hedged admissions, vague half promises and the type of sheer malarkey that is the coin of the realm in the sad remnants of a once great country that has been turned into something abominable and called The Homeland. His speech earned him accolades from those who are most guilty in aiding and abetting the criminal conduct of the National Security Agency, in particular House Intelligence Committee overlord Mike Rogers and Senate Intelligence Committee queen Dianne Feinstein who both belong in prison.

According to an article in the Guardian by Spencer Ackerman entitled "US government privacy board says NSA bulk collection of phone data is illegal":

According to the report, first published by the Washington Post and the New York Times, the privacy board found that the mass phone data collection was at best marginally useful for US counter-terrorism, a finding that went further than similar assessments by a federal judge and Obama’s own surveillance advisory board.

Not only did the board conclude that the bulk surveillance was a threat to constitutional liberties, it could not find “a single instance” in which the program “made a concrete difference in the outcome of a terrorism investigation”.

“Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.” 

That one has to smart for Barry and the boys especially after they were finally starting to gain a bit of traction in the massive counter-offensive to preserve the obscenity that is the NSA and to prevent further revelations of the boat load of illegal activities being conducted from being exposed. Obama fudged and punted the ball last week but what he did not do was to put any sort of at least a temporary restraint on the wanton criminality being conducted out of American Stasi HQ at Fort Meade. The programs are still in place and while the current 'debate' is over metadata what is not being discussed at all is that the metadata is likely just an indexing system that allows the instantaneous review of the real content that is within that data. This was brought up in an interview by Rob Kall of the progressive website OpEd News with NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake who calls the metadata collection the "cloak and cover" of the real secrets that involve "content collection". It comes at around the 40 minute mark in what is a very informative discussion with a patriotic American. Obama and his minions as well as the guardians and profiteers of the surveillance state's data-mining programs would love to keep the national discussion based solely on metadata but this is a truly a snakepit without a bottom.

Today's report is not going to sit well with the establishment. It was the same type of rebuke that was rudely issued to the Obama regime in December by federal judge Richard Leon who ruled that the NSA programs are “Orwellian” and “likely unconstitutional” raising the hopes of privacy rights advocates that the data-mining for undefined future purposes would be checked. That was not to happen though as the wagons were circled immediately and the propaganda pushback came after another ruling, this one by Manhattan based federal judge William Pauley saved the day for the fascists who have been playing offense ever since.

The report which is the latest example of how far these people have gone will now be attacked, smeared and targeted by the legal eagles within the bowels of this corrupt administration just as Judge Leon’s ruling was. Already Obama’s flacks in the White House have taken to the media podium to denounce it with the same obscene indignity of the entitled that we have been forced to swallow for well over a decade over the terms of two presidents running now. Were this a decent country then neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama would have ever been able to rise to the highest office in the and and both of whom in their ongoing authorization of these programs should have been impeached and removed from office.

(Image: AP)

Sunday Morning Propaganda Organs Defend NSA Spying

The usual corporate-state media defenders of Obama’s unconstitutional NSA Stasi surveillance apparatus were busily hosting establishment shills this Sunday morning, performing the usual damage control for the rogue government of The Homeland. It had been another week of damaging revelations, primarily the NSA spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private communications since 2002. Barry’s ass is in hot water on his goon squads and justifiably so, reports have begun to surface that none other than Obama himself knew about the snooping on Merkel which flies in the face of his statements to the contrary. Being that the reports put the origination of the spying at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration it was a marvelous bit of serendipity when none other than Richard B. Cheney, war criminal and traitor was trotted out on the prestigious electronic platform of ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos.  The former Bill Clinton flack turned celebrity talking head rolled out the red carpet for Cheney in the sort of dignified type of atmosphere more befitting a benevolent former statesman other than a sadistic, lying, torture-mongering, , mass murderer whose disembowelment of the constitution set the standard for Obama’s police state policies.

Stephanopoulos slobbered over the evildoer while lobbing softballs that were easily smacked out of the park by well-prepared talking points. Cheney defended activities of Obama’s NSA Stasi “It's something that we have been involved in for a long time. And the -- I think the unfortunate aspect of it is that Mr. Snowden has, in fact, divulged a lot of information which is damaging to the United States” as well as pimped his deranged neocon daughter Liz’s run for the upcoming Wyoming Senate seat. The bulk of Cheney’s airtime was however dedicated to a continuation of the promotion of standard neocon world dominance doctrine primarily pushing for an attack on Iran, long the apple of the eye of the PNAC imperialists:

“I don’t have a lot of confidence in the administration to be able to negotiate an agreement. I think sanctions offer some prospect of bringing the Iranians around. I’ve talked to my friends in that part of the region. I still know them, a lot of them, and they’re very fearful that the whole Iranian exercise is going to go the same way as the Syrian exercise; that is, that there will be bold talk from the administration. But in the final analysis, nothing effective will be done about the Iranian program,”

Croaked Cheney in his trademark serpentine whisper, his “friends” likely his benefactors in the House of Saud and the right-wing government of Israeli strongman Bibi Netanyahu, two regimes that squeal the loudest for American blood and treasure to be shed to protect their own power base that don’t have the stones to go it alone. Not that I would expect anything else from an elitist turd like Stephanopoulos but a question on Cheney’s view on comments by Republican mega-donor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson suggesting a nuclear strike on Iran would have been a relevant thing to ask given that he will likely be her sugar daddy.

Following Cheney was arch neocon propagandist William Kristol, a coward’s coward who has never met a Middle East war that he wouldn’t send some other poor bastard off to die in all the while grinning like some obscene Chesire cat. The credibility that is afforded to these ridiculously phony political discussion programs would make probably be an embarrassment to Joseph Goebbels but that is the way we roll in The Homeland. In fact the quicker that the appearances are booked, just look at defense industry pitchmen John McCain and Lindsey Graham who on any given Sunday morning will be seen selling death to credulous viewers along with their morning orange juice. Then of course there is Peter King, a hypocritical fanatic whose anti-Muslim tribunals are an embarrassment to any concept of a free and decent society. The Long Island demagogue routinely rails against “terrorists” yet it is never once pointed out that he himself long supported the militant wing of the Irish Republican Army that murdered civilians with relish.

The ever swinish King was front and center as was the uber-fascist House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent and by nature a man who gets his rocks off with seeing federal thugs conducting home invasions under mysterious and trumped up evidence. Absent was the usual false equivalence nor any serious alternative voices that place the gross constitutional violations of the big-money surveillance state in a context outside of that permitted by the state.  This is where the mythology of a government paralyzed by internal strife, party civil wars and rancorous partisan paralysis is exposed as the crap that it truly is. When it comes to matters of suppressing civil liberties, hypocrisy, war, torture and thuggery and most of all being able to gather information from everyone on earth for some vague future usage that probably involves “selling” intelligence secrets to big corporations by government operatives for industrial espionage the unified voices of state power are all singing in unison from the same hymnal. King provided Obama with the 'bipartisan' cover for the Merkel surveillance, invoking the treasured talisman of flag-draped fascism 9/11 - "As far as Germany, that's where the Hamburg Plot began, which led to 9/11. They've had dealings with Iran and Iraq, North Korea -- the French and the Germans, other European countries."  It might be noted that the Germans also had past dealings with Nazis, a group that both King and Rogers would fit in very nicely with.

Saturday’s Washington rally against NSA intrusions on privacy predictably get much press here in the fascist states of America, the walkoff World Series win by the St. Louis Cardinals over the Boston Red Sox on a controversial “obstruction” call dominated this morning’s big stories. Whatever coverage that was offered up tried to downplay the number of participants that gathered in D.C., this Reuters story refers to “hundreds” while more reputable foreign news sources reported the presence of “thousands”. I suppose that Reuters is at least technically right being that ten times one hundred equals one thousand but it was just more of the same dishonesty, propaganda and outright balderdash that is spoon fed to the lemmings by a media teeming with rats, paid operatives and careerists that long ago abrogated the responsibility of a free press that the First Amendment was supposed to guarantee.

Be sure not to miss tonight's 60 Minutes, which will feature former CIA official Michael Morrell capping off the day vilifying former Booz Allen government contractor employee and NSA whistleblower for revealing the existence of the "black budget".  In a preview of what promises to be a grand promenade of big fascist government lies Morrell cries wolf that Snowden has put Americans in danger and that outing the black budget is - "I think this is the most serious leak-- the most serious compromise of classified information in the history of the U.S. intelligence community".  It does'nt take much to see who the true enemies of America are, just turn on your television every Sunday morning.

The Fix is In: Cass Sunstein to Review Obama’s Stasi

The Obama administration, still dissembling about the true magnitude of big government’s domestic surveillance and data-mining programs has chosen to just whitewash it all. In a move that should surprise nobody who has been watching the shifty bastard, El Presidente is about to pack his promised NSA review board with cronies and insiders. While Obama couldn’t quite get away with letting the perjuring pimpernel James Clapper head his dog and pony show he is going to go one better. It has been reported that none other than longtime crony from back in the pre-Harvard Chicago days Cass Sunstein, a dangerous fascist ideologue will have a prime seat on Barry’s crackerjack team of ‘outsiders’ tasked with what promises to be an outrageously bogus fraud. It is like having the proverbial pack of wolves put in charge of guarding the hen house. Sunstein is the author of the manifesto on Conspiracy Theories that touted the infiltration of those groups that questioned shady government conduct – COINTELPRO anyone?

Joining Sunstein will be such prominent establishment hacks as former Clinton-Bush bureaucrat Richard Clarke, he of the “hair on fire” fame who brought down the house during the 9/11 Kean Commission hearings by proclaiming to Americans that “your government failed you”. Clarke managed to parlay his star making turn into a minor celebrity status as one of those ‘experts’ who is always in front of the cameras and appears on such gauche television shows as HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, the smarmy, religion bashing anti-Muslim bigot that liberals adore. Clarke should be an accomplished expert in government failure, I guess that is his ante money to get into this game. In addition to Sunstein and Clarke the Obama dream team will be filled out by former CIA placeholder Michael Morell and Peter Swire a White House insider who is being touted by the Washington Post as “a measured but critical voice of post 9/11 information-gathering practices”.  With a recommendation like that from the beltway’s preeminent megaphone the finely tuned horseshit detectors of those who actually care about any of this stuff in an existential sense are screeching. Hell, this is as legitimate as when virulent Kennedy hater Allen Dulles was placed on the Warren Commission.

I suppose that it could be worse, after all Obama did not appoint former DHS honcho Michael Certoff now of The Chertoff Group who used his insider influence to parlay the failed Christmas Day “underwear bomber” plot into big time mega bucks. Chertoff’s firm at the time was representing a security industrial complex company by the name of Rapiscan which was able to use the ridiculous and highly suspect ‘terrorist’ plan to sell hundreds of those wonderful naked full-body scanners to the TSA.  However Rapiscan was recently dumped by the TSA and government but not until after Chertoff  made his millions. Obama I suppose also deserves some ‘credit’ for not including authoritarian nutjob Michael Hayden to his NSA investigative crew. Former NSA top dog Hayden has been spending a lot of time in carrying water for Obama’s Stasi as of late and made the following ridiculous statement that shows that the phony war on terror has always been about a war on all of us:

“If and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial, what does this group do?” said retired air force general Michael Hayden, who from 1999 to 2009 ran the NSA and then the CIA, referring to “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years”.

“They may want to come after the US government, but frankly, you know, the dot-mil stuff is about the hardest target in the United States,” Hayden said, using a shorthand for US military networks. “So if they can’t create great harm to dot-mil, who are they going after? Who for them are the World Trade Centers? The World Trade Centers, as they were for al-Qaida.”

Complete and utter nonsense and yet it gets credibility and airtime which is indicative of a lying and on the dole state media. As I believe I previously mentioned Hayden reminds me of the nerdy, nondescript neighbor who one day is found to have the remains of dozens of missing children buried in his backyard  Incidentally Hayden is a member of guess who? – The Chertoff Group. There is one hell of a lot of coin to be made in keeping the American sheeple terrified, distracted and obedient while their own tax money is extracted to enslave them. Nice work if you can get it. So it’s just another day in the United States of Scared Shitless and the corporate-state media is fixated on poor doomed Bradley Manning’s gender issues. Chelsea Manning is as popular as Lady Gaga on the electronic crackpipe, too bad that none of the vile networks, papers, websites nor their paid shills gave a rat’s ass when “Chelsea” was tortured and dragged before a Stalinist style show trial for blowing the whistle on war crimes.

And today The Guardian has also just broken yet another new story on NSA rottenness in that the U.S government was using your money to subsidize tech corporations compliance costs. The British government can continue to send their goons into news organizations as though they were the finger men of V For Vendetta’s Norsefire party but it all continues to come out. I personally cannot wait until the day that the shoe drops that all of this surveillance has been being provided to the same big Wall Street racketeers who crashed the economy and then were bailed out by Barry and the Boys.

Perhaps it will finally be the day when we roll out the guillotines.