General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums''Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?''
SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/23/edward-snowden-daniel-sheehan_n_3806135.html
whatchamacallit
(15,558 posts)K&R
Octafish
(55,745 posts)I know you know, whatchamacallit. Here's one guy who wishes no one remembered:
'All right, you've covered your ass.'' -- George W Bush to CIA briefer, Aug. 2001.
From WaPo's review of Suskind's book:
Tenet and his loyalists also settle a few scores with the White House here. The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now." Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department's counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan's army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton's message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we're going to lose our prey if we're not careful."
SOURCE: The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light
President Gore would have listened to Richard Clark and done something before bin Laden. Where would all the military contractors and lobbyists be today? Collecting unemployment, I hope. The warmongers and traitors who used the attacks of 9-11 to make war on Iraq would probably still be free as they would never have had the chance to lie America into war.
whatchamacallit
(15,558 posts)to the crap one we're in. Keep up the info flow, Octafish!
silvershadow
(10,336 posts)JFK.
nebenaube
(3,496 posts)I wonder if this is the next thing they will cop to in order to defuse Snowden...
mick063
(2,424 posts)Last edited Sun Aug 25, 2013, 10:18 AM - Edit history (1)
First Wyden and Udall, then Grayson, now Gore.
Democrats will be jumping off the ship. This is an unwinnable issue for the Party.
Pelosi and others are already declaring the, "If I only knew the magnitude" meme.
I expect a mass exodus. Democrats with political aspirations will be running for the exits. Feinstein, Obama, and a few MIC paid bluedogs will be left holding the bag.
The defenders have typed hundreds of words demonizing Snowden, for nothing.
Tear down the Utah facility.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Even though the little turd from Crawford ignored warnings about an attack on America, she took chimpeachment off the table.
Pelosi: Bush Impeachment `Off the Table
By Susan Ferrechio
The New York Times, November 8, 2006
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi promised Wednesday that when her party takes over, the new majority will not attempt to remove President Bush from office, despite earlier pledges to the contrary from others in the caucus.
I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table, Pelosi, D-Calif., said during a news conference.
Pelosi also said Democrats, despite complaining about years of unfair treatment by the majority GOP, are not about getting even with Republicans.
She said the GOP, which frequently excluded Democrats from conference committee hearings and often blocked attempts to introduce amendments, would not suffer similar treatment.
Democrats pledge civility and bipartisanship in the conduct of the work here and we pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president not partisanship.
CONTINUED...
http://www.nytimes.com/cq/2006/11/08/cq_1916.html
Ms. Pelosi never really expressed what that reason was, other than what can be called "buy-partisanship."
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)Those are damned shattering words from a former President.
AnotherMcIntosh
(11,064 posts)Downwinder
(12,869 posts)9/11 futures orders, I have to question the efficacy of the entire operation.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Money does that to people, along with making innocent ones dead.
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)which we are not allowed to talk about.
silvershadow
(10,336 posts)johnnyreb
(915 posts)...but I don't see no elephant. No sirree, not even any elephant dung. Nobody's gonna laugh at me by golly-- I'll just stand here and attract more democrats with my blank stare and obedient stance.
http://cattailmusic.com/mp3/DontObey_Ainslie04.mp3
PowerToThePeople
(9,610 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)January 05, 2006
Ray McGovern
EXCERPT...
But speed and agility cannot be the rationale for breaking FISA. The FISA law contains intentionally flexible provisions designed to provide speed and agility in expediting emergency requests. The law grants the attorney general enormous power and discretion to authorize secret emergency electronic surveillance and searches for up to 72 hours, before any court order is granted. No court order at all is required if the surveillance is terminated before the 72-hour period ends. So why did the Bush administration order NSA to skirt the FISA law protecting Americans from eavesdropping? This remains the most puzzling question.
The most cynical and, I fear, the most direct answer can be gleaned from Vice President Cheneys bizarre assertionsupported, no doubt, by a stack of in-house legal opinion, that in war time the president needs to have his powers unimpaired. As noted above, on Dec. 19, Gonzalez invoked the inherent authority under the Constitution of the commander in chief, as well as the equally ludicrous claim that Congress authorization of war after 9/11 trumps FISAa claim that even The Washington Post has termed impossible to believe.
These extreme views are the same ones that underpin the presidents decision to flout international and U.S. criminal law by approving practices like torture, until now almost universally rejected by civilized societies. The answer may be simpleimperial hubris, one might call it. And ifas seems to be the casesenior leaders like Colin Powell acquiesce in torture and Gen. Mike Hayden in illegal eavesdropping, shame on them. This would merely show, once again, that absolute power truly does corrupt absolutelyindeed, that even closeness to absolute power can.
A more nuanced explanation may lie in the physics of the challenges faced by NSA and the availability of sophisticated technologies not foreseen when the FISA law was passed in 1978. At the press conference, the attorney general issued a pointed reminder that there have been tremendous advances in technology since 1978. Recent press reports on the number of communications being monitored by NSA suggest that the number may be so large as to be technically or practically impossible to take to the attorney general for approval as individual FISA emergencies. Consistently high numbers of monitored communications could have trouble passing muster at the FISA court as emergencies, for the exceptions would quickly swallow the rule.
A recent article by Charles Freid in the Boston Globe suggests that communications are now selected for monitoring based on highly sophisticated algorithm programs and that at the first, broadest stages of the scan, no human being is involvedonly computers. This, and the high numbers involved, would make it impossible to obtain emergency AG approval on an individual basis, as required by FISA.
As Gonzales has indicated, initial soundings were taken with Congress and the prognosis was deemed poor for obtaining NSA vacuum-cleaner-type authority to suck up communicationsincluding those to or from Americansfrom wires and the ether. But is that not what government lawyers are for; i.e., to devise ways to make such things legal and possible at the same time? There is no sign of any serious effort on the administrations part toward that end. Rather, administration officials preferred to fall back on the anyway rationalization; i.e., the notion pushed by top administration lawyers that the president has the power to authorize eavesdropping anyway.
CONTINUED via Waybac Internet Archive...
http://web.archive.org/web/20060111185026/http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20060105/j_edgar_hoover_with_supercomputers.php
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour. A veteran of 27 years in CIA's analysis directorate, he is now a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
PowerToThePeople
(9,610 posts)Good article.
Fire Walk With Me
(38,893 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)By Christopher H. Pyle
ConsortiumNews.com, June 13, 2013
Edward Snowden is not a traitor. Nor is he a hero, at least not yet. But he probably will be martyred by an Establishment that cannot abide critics.
Both House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-California, have called him a traitor, which only shows how ignorant they are. Under the U.S. Constitution (and the Espionage Act of 1917), it is not enough for a leaker to do something that might arguable aid or comfort an enemy; the leaker must also have the intent, by his disclosures, to betray the United States. No proof exists the Mr. Snowden had either motive.
SNIP...
But Congress probably wont investigate, because Booz Allen has hired Mike McConnell, the former NSA (and National Intelligence) director, as its vice chairman.
Since 9/11, private corporations have greatly expanded the intelligence community. Seventy percent of the communitys budget now goes to private contractors. So members of Congress, reporters, and suspected leakers are not just vulnerable to government surveillance; they are vulnerable to corporate reprisals, should their investigations or disclosures pose a threat to companies in the intelligence business. These surveillance powers can be used not only to protect secret agencies from criticism; they can be used, as General Motors once used them, to try to discredit critics like Ralph Nader.
Many people believe that they have nothing to fear from government/corporate surveillance because they have nothing to hide. But every bureaucracy is a solution in search of a problem, and if it cant find a problem to fit its solution, they will redefine the problem. In the 1960s, the surveillance bureaucracies redefined anti-war and civil rights protests as communist enterprises; today the same bureaucracies redefine anti-war Quakers, environmentalists, and animal rights activists as terrorists. So political activists, no matter how benign, have good reasons to fear these bureaucracies.
Again, most Americans do not worry because they are not political activists, reporters, investigating legislators, or crusading attorneys general like Eliot Spitzer. Most Americans are like the Germans who did not fear the secret police because they were not Jews. But all Americans depend on reporters, leakers and crusading legislators to keep government agencies and private corporations under control. So they should worry about government secrecy, the militarization of surveillance, the privatization of intelligence, and the role of corporate money in elections.
Snowden has revealed just enough to show how pervasive this spying is. Will we pay attention, or will we be distracted by irrelevant attacks upon his character? Given all he has sacrificed to let us know what is happening inside our secret government, dont we owe it to him to pay attention?
Professor Christopher H. Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He is the author of Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, Getting Away With Torture, and The Constitution under Siege (with Richard Pious). In 1970, he disclosed the militarys spying on civilian politics and worked for three congressional committees to end it, including Sen. Frank Churchs Select Committee on Intelligence.
CONTINUED...
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/06/13/edward-snowdens-brave-choice/
Thanks for your input, Mr. President!
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Brave New World Order
by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer
Orbis Books, 1992, paper
EXCERPT...
The role of the media is another apparent difference between the National Security States of El Salvador and the United States. The Salvadoran state uses violence and terror to intimidate or silence major progressive information outlets such as El Diario or the presses at the Catholic University. The mainline media in the United States, like the church, are instruments of conformity within the dominating society. This conformity isn't achieved through terror and intimidation, as in El Salvador, but there is conformity nonetheless. This can be illustrated by a look at coverage of the Gulf War.
The war in the Gulf was probably the most censored and media-managed war in U.S. history. The Pentagon launched the war to coincide with the evening news, forced reporters into escorted press pools, banned coverage on U.S. soldiers returning in coffins, blacked out the first forty-eight hours of the ground war, provided selective footage of "smart bombs" hitting their targets with precision, exercised the right of approval over final copy and footage, and flew local reporters in to cover selected "hometown troops." "I've never seen anything to compare to it," said New York Times war correspondent Malcolm Browne, "in the degree of surveillance and control the military has over the correspondents."
Heavy-handed government censorship was only part of the problem confronting U.S. citizens wanting to make informed judgments about the war. They also faced biases in the U.S. media. According to Colman McCarthy, twenty-five of twenty-six major U.S. newspapers supported the Gulf War. The print and other media uncritically adopted Pentagon phrases such as "collateral damage" and "smart bombs." After the war it was reported that only 6,520 of 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait were "smart," and even these often hit targets that were important to the civilian population. The media ,) throughout the war helped to sanitize civilian casualties and reduced the war to a glorified video game. A report by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) describes the conflict of interest of major TV news channels that are owned by major corporations tied to military weapons production and oil:
Most of the corporate-owned media have close relationships to the military and industry: The chair of Capital / Cities/ABC . . . is on the board of Texaco, and CBS's board includes directors from Honeywell and the Rand Corporation. But no news outlet is as potentially compromised as NBC, wholly owned by General Electric.... In 1989 alone GE received nearly $2 billion in U.S. military contracts for systems employed in the Gulf War effort ... NBC's potential conflicts go beyond weaponry. The government of Kuwait is believed to be a major GE stockholder, having owned 2.1 percent of GE stock in 1982, the last year for which figures are available.... Having profited from weapons systems used in the Gulf, and anticipating lucrative deals for restocking U.S. arsenals, GE is also poised to profit from the rebuilding of Kuwait. GE told the man Street Journal (3/21/91) it expects to win contracts worth "hundreds of millions of dollars."
Conflict of interest may help explain the results of a FAIR survey of sources for ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly news. The survey "found that of 878 on-air sources, only one was a representative of a national peace organization." This, FAIR noted, contrasted with the fact that "seven players from the Super Bowl were brought on to comment on the War.''
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/New_World_Order/US_Nat_Secur_State_BNWO.html
That's Gulf War I, another war for profit launched by Poppy Bush under false pretenses in 1991.
nradisic
(1,362 posts)Obscenely outrageous.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Obama Has Already Broken His Pledge on Surveillance Reform
Last week, he promised an "independent" review by "outside experts." Then he assigned insider James Clapper to lead it.
CONOR FRIEDERSDORF
The Atlantic, AUG 13 2013
President Obama pledged last week that he would take "specific steps" to reform U.S. surveillance policy. This week, he proved unable to keep his word for any longer than a weekend.
What was the latest Barack-and-switch? Here's what Obama said Friday to reassure Americans about the NSA, with my emphasis:
So I'm tasking this independent group to step back and review our capabilities, particularly our surveillance technologies, and they'll consider how we can maintain the trust of the people, how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used, ask how surveillance impacts our foreign policy, particularly in an age when more and more information is becoming public. And they will provide an interim report in 60 days and a final report by the end of this year, so that we can move forward with a better understanding of how these programs impact our security, our privacy and our foreign policy.
Got that?
An independent group of outside experts, whose tasks include ensuring that there is no abuse and assessing the impact of surveillance on privacy. That's what he promised the American people.
Yet here's the order he released Monday to James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, again with my emphasis
The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust. Within 60 days of its establishment, the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013.
As Marcy Wheeler notes, "In the memo Obama just released ordering James Clapper to form such a committee, those words 'outside' and 'independent' disappear entirely." Indeed, putting the director of national intelligence in charge all but guarantees that the effort will be neither of those things -- especially since the Clapper has already lied to Congress about NSA spying. This "Review Group" won't even report its findings directly to the public or Congressional oversight committees. It'll report to Obama ... but indirectly, through Clapper.
CONTINUED w links n details...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/obama-has-already-broken-his-pledge-on-surveillance-reform/278613/
Can't be less like Brave New World as, other than Miller Lite and its ilk, there's no soma for the proles.
Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)The rest of us are pretty happy to watch America turn into a surveillance state run by the corporations.
I, for one, welcome our Corporate Overlords.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash
BY DAVID KRAVETS
Wired.com, 07.26.13
The numbers tell the story in votes and dollars. On Wednesday, the House voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSAs phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 no voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 yes voters.
Thats the upshot of a new analysis by MapLight, a Berkeley-based non-profit that performed the inquiry at WIREDs request. The investigation shows that defense cash was a better predictor of a members vote on the Amash amendment than party affiliation. House members who voted to continue the massive phone-call-metadata spy program, on average, raked in 122 percent more money from defense contractors than those who voted to dismantle it.
Overall, political action committees and employees from defense and intelligence firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, Honeywell International, and others ponied up $12.97 million in donations for a two-year period ending December 31, 2012, according to the analysis, which MapLight performed with financing data from OpenSecrets. Lawmakers who voted to continue the NSA dragnet-surveillance program averaged $41,635 from the pot, whereas House members who voted to repeal authority averaged $18,765.
Of the top 10 money getters, only one House member Rep. Jim Moran (D-Virginia) voted to end the program.
CONTINUED...
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/money-nsa-vote/
Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)Not without adequate compensation, anyway.
panader0
(25,816 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Sensational Scoops
Abuses & Aberrations
excerpted from the book
Challenging the Secret Government
The Post-Watergate Investigation of the CIA and FBI
by Kathryn S. Olmsted
University of North Carloina Press, 1996, paper
EXCERPT...
Congress's first serious attempt to limit the post-Vietnam CIA came in 1973, as legislators angrily reasserted their power against a deceitful and discredited executive. A bipartisan group of senators, hoping to restrict the president's power to conduct military operations without congressional approval, introduced the War Powers Bill. Senator Tom Eagleton objected, however, that the bill had a major loophole: it did not apply to nation's secret warriors. He introduced an amendment to extend it to include the CIA. When his amendment was decisively defeated, the Missouri senator decided to oppose the bill, arguing that it was useless without constraints on the CIA.
Although the CIA easily survived this first salvo, it would continue to fight a defensive battle against congressional assaults for the next two years. In 1974, Senator Howard Baker and Representative Lucien Nedzi headed separate inquiries into the agency's murky role in Watergate. Neither committee was able to solve this mystery definitively. But Baker's report implied that there was a good deal more to the CIA's involvement in the scandal than was then known. Baker believes that his report was the beginning of a new era of congressional oversight of intelligence. "I don't think there ever would have been a Church committee without that [report]," he says. When hawkish Republicans like Howard Baker doubted the CIA's truthfulness, the agency had good reason to worry.
Then in the fall of 1974, Seymour Hersh revealed that the White House and the CIA had lied to Congress about U.S. involvement in Chile. Mike Mansfield, now Senate majority leader, tried to use Congress's outrage over Chile to win approval for another of his periodic proposals to increase oversight of the CIA and to investigate the intelligence community. This time a liberal Republican, Charles Mathias, cosponsored his effort. Other congressmen introduced similar proposals.
Two liberal legislators, Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota and Representative Elizabeth Holtzman of New York, attempted to do more than investigate: they wanted to ban all covert operations. Abourezk believed that the CIA would never inform Congress of its most secret actions, even if the oversight system were reformed. So, he concluded, "since they are never going to tell us, the only real alternative is to take away their money, abolish their operations so that we shall never have that kind of immoral, illegal activity committed in the name of the American people.'' Abourezk's bill gained the support of only seventeen senators. Holtzman's similar bill in the House lost 291-108.
Although the Ninety-third Congress refused to ban covert actions, it did decide to enact the toughest oversight bill in history. The Hughes-Ryan amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, named after Representative Leo Ryan and Senator Harold Hughes, expanded the number of ~ congressional committees to be briefed by the CIA from four to six, adding the more liberal Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs Committees to the list. Most important, the amendment attempted to improve accountability by requiring the president to make a "finding" that covert action was necessary for national security before reporting it "in a timely fashion" to the six committees. It was widely understood that this meant within forty-eight hours.
The Hughes-Ryan amendment was more significant than anything that would later come out of the Pike and Church committees. It substantially increased the amount of control Congress exercised over the CIA and, indirectly, the nation's foreign policy. By forcing the CIA to brief six (and later eight) congressional committees, and by demanding timely notification of covert actions, the Hughes-Ryan amendment gave Congress more oversight power than it had possessed before-or than it would have after the amendment was gutted in 1980.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Meat_Ax_CTSG.html
WillyT
(72,631 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)by Mark Jaycox
Published on Saturday, August 24, 2013 by Electronic Frontier Foundation, via CommonDreams.org
Since the revelations of confirmed National Security Agency spying in June, three different "investigations" have been announced. One by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), another by the Director of National Intelligence, Gen. James Clapper, and the third by the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally called the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).
All three investigations are insufficient, because they are unable to find out the full details needed to stop the government's abuse of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The PCLOB can only requestnot requiredocuments from the NSA and must rely on its goodwill, while the investigation led by Gen. Clapper is led by a man who not only lied to Congress, but also oversees the spying. And the Senate Intelligence Committeewhich was originally designed to effectively oversee the intelligence communityhas failed time and time again. What's needed is a new, independent, Congressional committee to fully delve into the spying.
The PCLOB: Powerless to Obtain Documents
The PCLOB was created after a recommendation from the 9/11 Commission to ensure civil liberties and privacy were included in the government's surveillance and spying policies and practices.
But it languished. From 2008 until May of this year, the board was without a Chair and unable to hire staff or perform any work. It was only after the June revelations that the President asked the board to begin an investigation into the unconstituional NSA spying. Yet even with the full board constituted, it is unable to fulfill its mission as it has no choice but to base its analysis on a steady diet of carefully crafted statements from the intelligence community.
As we explained, the board must rely on the goodwill of the NSA's director, Gen. Keith Alexander, and Gen. Clappertwo men who have repeatedly said the NSA doesn't collect information on Americans.
In order to conduct a full investigation, the PCLOB will need access to all relevant NSA, FBI, and DOJ files. But the PCLOB is unable to compel testimony or documents because Congress did not give it the same powers as a Congressional committee or independent agency. This is a major problem. If the NSA won't hand over documents to Congress, then it will certainly not give them to the PCLOB.
The Clapper Investigation: Overseen by a Man Accused of Lying to Congress
The second investigation was announced by President Obama in a Friday afternoon news conference. The President called for the creation of an "independent" task force with "outside experts" to make sure "there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used." Less than two days later, the White House followed up with a press release announcing the task force would be led by Gen. Clapper and would also report to him. What's even worse: the task force was not tasked with looking at any abuse. It was told to focus on how to "protect our national security and advance our foreign policy." And just this week, ABC News reported the task force will be full of thorough Washington insiders--not "outside experts." For instance, one has advocated the Department of Homeland Security be allowed to scan all Internet traffic going in and out of the US. And another, while a noted legal scholar on regulatory issues, has written a paper about government campaigns to infiltrate online groups and activists. In one good act, the White House selected Peter Swire to be on the task force. Swire is a professor at Georgia Tech and has served as the White House's first ever Chief Privacy Officer. Recently, he signed an amicus brief in a case against the NSA spying by the Electronic Privacy Information Center arguing that the NSAs telephony metadata program is illegal under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Despite this, and at the end of a day, a task force led by General Clapper full of insiders,and not directed to look at the extensive abusewill never get at the bottom of the unconstitutional spying.
The Senate Intelligence Committee Has Already Failed
The last "investigation" occurring is a "review" led by the Senate Intelligence Committee overseeing the intelligence community. But time and time again the committee has failed at providing any semblance of oversight. First, the chair and ranking member of the committee, Senators Dianne Feinstein (CA) and Saxby Chambliss (GA), respectively, are stalwart defenders of the NSA and its spying activities. They have both justified the spying, brushed aside any complaints, and denied any ideas of abuse by the NSA.
Besides defending the intelligence community, the committee leadership have utterly failed in oversightthe reason why the Senate Intelligence Committee was originally created by the Church Committee. As was revealed last week, Senator Feinstein was not shown or even told about the thousands of violations of the spying programs in NSA audits of the programs. This is in direct contradiction to her statements louting the "robust" oversight of the Intelligence Committee. Lastly, the committee is prone to secrets and hiding behind closed doors: this year, the Senate Intelligence Committee has met publicly only twice. What's clear is that the Intelligence Committee has been unable to carry out its oversight role and fresh eyes are needed to protect the American people from the abuses of the NSA.
A New Church Committee
All three of these investigations are destined to fail. What's needed is a new, special, investigatory committee to look into the abuses of by the NSA, its use of spying powers, its legal justifications, and why the intelligence committees were unable to rein in the spying. In short, we need a contemporary Church Committee. It's time for Congress to reassert its oversight capacity. The American public must be provided more information about the NSA's unconstitutional actions and the NSA must be held accountable. Tell your Congressmen now to join the effort.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Mark Jaycox is a Policy Analyst and Legislative Assistant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His issues include user privacy, civil liberties, EULAs, and current legislation or policy rising out of Washington, DC
SOURCE w links: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/24-1
Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)"If you don't let us spy on everybody, and pay us for doing so, we'll let the 'terrorists" kill you."
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H.L. Mencken
Octafish
(55,745 posts)By Thomas Gaist
World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org 23 August 2013
FBI Director Robert Mueller alleged that new terrorism threats were emerging in Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Algeria, Syria, and Egypt, as well as in the United States during an interview with cable channel CNN on Thursday. The purpose of Muellers statement is to stoke fear and apprehension in the American population to justify the police state surveillance programs set up by the government.
You have al Qaeda growing in countries like Somalia, but most particularly in Yemen. And theres still substantial threat out of Yemen, said Mueller. And now you have the countries in the Arab Spring: Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Mali; Egypt most recently, where theyre breeding grounds for radical extremists
you have, within the United States, the growth of homegrown, radicalized extremists who are radicalized on the Internet and then get their instructions for developing explosives on the Internet, as well.
Mueller provided no facts to support his claims. Of course, even accepting this were all true, no American media interviewer would ask why so many in the Middle East hated and wanted to attack the US and whether or not that anything to do with predatory American military and foreign policy in the region.
Overall, the FBI directors comments to CNN were a series of lies and distortions. For example, Mueller asserted that the NSA surveillance programs developed since the 2001 attacks could have prevented the 9/11 events by allowing the government to identify the individual plotters in advance: I think theres a good chance we would have prevented at least a part of 9/11. In other words, there were four planes. There were almost 2019 persons involved. I think we would have had a much better chance of identifying those individuals who were contemplating that attack.
The claim that NSA spying might have prevented 9/11, which is not original to Mueller, is contradicted by an entire body of evidence. Many, if not all, of the perpetrators were well known to the FBI and the CIA, who monitored and tracked the plotters for many months. The CIA and FBI ignored repeated warnings from local agents and agents abroad of the threat of an impending attack, including the use of aircraft against buildings. The preponderance of the evidence strongly suggests, in fact, that the Bush administration permitted some sort of terrorist attack to proceed, in order to provide it the pretext for the launching of wars in the Middle East and the passage of anti-democratic, repressive legislation.
CONTINUED...
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/24/muel-a23.html
As for NSA spying possibly stopping 9-11, Mueller must've missed last year's release which indicated NSA did warn Smirko to no avail:
New NSA docs contradict Bush Administration 9-11 claims
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)...and absolute secrecy for itself.
winter is coming
(11,785 posts)Any politician who doesn't see that is either too stupid or too corrupt to be in office.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)To them the rest of us are like cicadas. A noise that you only have to deal with every four years.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)No Scrutability.
No Accountability.
No Telling Who Benefits.
Seeing how the rich keep getting richer and everyone else poorer, we've got a pretty good idea what they're doing with all that data.
SOURCE: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
Pholus
(4,062 posts)Way to go, sir! A scholar, a gentleman and someone who gets it.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)by Evan McMurry
MEDIAite.com, 11:17 pm, June 14th, 2013
Former Vice President Al Gore was quick and vociferous in denouncing the NSAs surveillance programs when they were revealed last week, and he continued his intense critique on Friday.
[font color="blue"]This in my view violates the Constitution, Gore told The Guardian. The Fourth Amendment and the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment language is crystal clear. It is not acceptable to have a secret interpretation of a law that goes far beyond any reasonable reading of either the law or the Constitution and then classify as top secret what the actual law is.
Whereas many high-profile Democrats have defended the practice as necessary to stop terror plots, Gore remained steadfast in his belief that the surveillance programs went against the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, saying I quite understand the viewpoint that many have expressed that they are fine with it and they just want to be safe but that is not really the American way.[/font color]
When asked about public support for surveillance, which wavers depending on which survey you consult, Gore replied, I am not sure how to interpret polls on this, because we dont do dial groups on the Bill of Rights.
[font color="blue"]I think that the Congress and the administration need to make some changes in the law and in their behavior so as to honor and obey the Constitution of the United States, he said. It is that simple.[/font color]
CONTINUED w links...
http://www.mediaite.com/online/al-gore-tears-into-nsa-defenders-we-don%E2%80%99t-do-dial-groups-on-the-bill-of-rights/
PS: He does get it, Pholus. Do you think Albert G. will run in '16? I sure hope so.
Pholus
(4,062 posts)snappyturtle
(14,656 posts)otohara
(24,135 posts)look around, digital cameras everywhere, not all owned by the guvment.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Joe Garofoli
SFGate.com
Last week an unholy alliance of gasp!!! Republicans AND Democrats narrowly defeated the now-storied Amash amendment that would have cut funding for the NSA surveillance program. How unholy: Nancy Pelosi and Michele Bachmann were voting the same way. and Pelosi is STILL catching heat for it. Stop, the room is spinning.
So our pals at the nonpartisan Maplight.org got out their abacus and did a little ciphering. [font color="green"]About 70 percent of the money Congress sends to the NSA goes to defense contractors. (The NSAs annual budget is between $10-$20 billion. )[/font color]
Youll never guess what: The House members who opposed curtailing the NSAs power got, on average, 122 percent more money from defense contractors than did members who voted to defund it, according to a Maplight a breakdown. The top recipient: Californias very own Rep. Buck McKeon, R-CA, with $526,600.
Pelosi, by the way, was way down the list with $47,000 from defense industry types. Rep. Justin Amash, the amendments sponsor, only received $1,400.
CONTINUED w the names of the Reps, how much they got, and how they voted:
http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/07/29/folo-the-money-house-members-who-opposed-nsa-clampdown-got-most-from-defense-contractors/
Th1onein
(8,514 posts)Sing it, brother!
Octafish
(55,745 posts)By Charles Seife
Slate.com Aug. 22, 2013
Most people don't know the history of Von Neumann Hall, the nearly windowless building hidden behind the engineering quadrangle at Princeton. I found out my junior year, when, as a bright-eyed young math major, I was recruited to work at the National Security Agency.
Von Neumann Hall was the former site of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a math-heavy research organization that did work for an agency that, at that time, dared not speak its name. The close ties between Princeton and the NSA went back decades, I discovered, and some of the professors I had been learning from were part of a secret brotherhood of number jocks who worked on really tough math problems for the sake of national security. I was proud to join the fraternityone that was far bigger than I had ever imagined. According to NSA expert James Bamford, the agency is the single largest employer of mathematicians on the planet. It's a good bet that any high-quality math department of a reasonable size has a faculty member who's done work for the NSA.
I worked for the NSA in 1992 and 1993 under the auspices of the Director's Summer Program, which snaffles up hot young undergraduate math majors around the country each year. After clearing a security checkwhich included not just a polygraph exam but also a couple of FBI agents snooping around campus to see what mischief I had been up toI wound up at Fort Meade, Md., for indoctrination.
It was more than 20 years ago that I received my first security briefing, and a lot of what I learned is now outdated. Back then, few had heard of what was nicknamed "No Such Agency," and the government wanted to keep it that way. We were taught not to breathe a word about the NSA; if anyone asked, we worked for the Department of Defense. That's even what it said on my resume and one of my NSA-issued ID cards. Now there's little point to such pretense. The agency has been outed and is a regular fixture of Page 1 headlines. In 1992, I was taught that the code words we stamped on all our classified documents were a closely guarded secret, that it was a crime to reveal them to outsiders. But a quick Google search shows that government websites are chock-full of papers clearly marked with words and phrases that were at one time for the eyes of only those few with the need to know.
Another thing they used to say at those briefings was that the might of the NSA would never be used against U.S. citizens. Back when I signed up, the agency made it crystal clear to us that we were empowered to protect our nation against only foreign enemies, not domestic ones. To do otherwise was against the NSA charter. More importantly, I got the strong sense that it was against the culture of the place. After working there for two summers, I genuinely believed that my colleagues would be horrified if they thought our work was being used to snoop on fellow Americans. Has that changed, too?
CONTINUED...
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/08/nsa_domestic_spying_mathematicians_should_speak_out.html
There are a lot of people who want to return America to a democracy, including Mr. Gore and Mr. Seife. Thanks for being one, Th1onein.
Th1onein
(8,514 posts)You serve. It is appreciated.
uponit7771
(90,367 posts)Please don't believe the hype sir, 95% of this whole issue is about what fear a relative few can stoke up about the government and what abilities computers do an don't have.
I drive on the highway and cameras look at where my car is going all the time, theirs not proof that they are looking into the car for anything
The digital highways are little difference, they're public...it easier to look at where the traffic is going but to presume the government is looking INTO all the traffic, in this case data, when there's no solid proof that it's widespread or continuous is what the masters of sophistry are pushing.
The stoking is the equivalent of the second X-Men movie where the public was afraid of them because the mutants had these powers and they didn't, there were a few of the stoking up fear.... a few of the mutants and humans that wanted war in the first place.
We need to look at the 1976 law again, make sure the breadth of what can be surveyed today is appropriate, I don't think it is... it's like a cat chasing billions of mice tails to no where.
All gov isn't all bad at all times, there's a generation that has grown up with not only seeing the need for gov but have seen where gov can help...and this gov = bad meme doesn't make sense
thx for reading Mr President
Regards
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Last edited Sun Aug 25, 2013, 10:17 AM - Edit history (1)
Good job!
How the NSA spied on Americans before the Internet
By Caitlin Dewey
Washington Post, August 23
EXCERPT...
Spying on Americans
The problem then, however, was much the same as the problem today: The logged calls and telegrams often involved U.S. citizens. A 1975 investigation into Nixon-era intelligence practices, organized under the so-called the Church Committee, found that the NSA had eavesdropped on 1,200 Americans between 1967 and 1973, often because of their political activities. In the early 60s, the agency monitored every telephone call between the U.S. and Cuba before moving on to spy on civil rights activists, anti-war demonstrators and celebrities. Under SHAMROCK, NSA analysts logged and read millions of telegrams sent to and from Americans, including an estimated 150,000 telegrams per month in the last three years of the program.
NSA officials told (the House Intelligence Committee) in closed session that at present NSA is not eavesdropping on domestic or overseas telephone calls placed by (Americans), reads a brief about the Church hearings in the New York Times. It continues:
As a result of the Church hearings, Congress passed a number of reforms that tried to narrow the use of wiretaps to cases where critical national security information was at stake. But Congress struggled to address another issue identified in the hearings: The NSAs technology was quickly becoming so advanced, and so secretive, that the government didnt know how to legislate it. In the words of the Church committee in 1976:
The watch list activities and the sophisticated capabilities that they highlight present some of the most crucial privacy issues facing this nation. Space-age technology has outpaced the law.
That problem, as weve learned recently, never really went away. For one thing, oversight didnt exactly improve: A 1990 series in The Post delved into the agencys regulation and found that fewer than 10 congressmen even had the clearance to see everything the agency was doing and what it produced, let alone to exercise any oversight. Former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (R-Ga.) told The Posts Vernon Loeb in 1999 that Congress had not asked the NSA a single hard question about electronic surveillance in the preceding 24 years.
CONTINUED...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/23/how-the-nsa-spied-on-americans-before-the-internet/
ETA: article.
FYI: When it isn't "We the People" running the government we have a problem. Police States spy on the citizens, giving them an edge with perceived enemies, almost certainly with particular elected representatives. Democracies are aware of what the government does in the name of the People.
uponit7771
(90,367 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Keep reading. Try learning. Never give up.
Who knows? One day you might be a contributor, uponit7771.
uponit7771
(90,367 posts)...not have caught the bombers if there were no cameras surveying the area.
SPYING is totally different, that's looking into non public places or were there's an expectation of privacy.
There's been no proof of widesperad systematic spying, only people stoking fears of the "computerizers" doing such
Octafish
(55,745 posts)HangOnKids
(4,291 posts)Thank you. Priceless.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Inspired by a newsletter called Flush Rush...
Union Scribe
(7,099 posts)Just when I think I've seen the worst argument for the surveillance state, along comes one worse...
MisterP
(23,730 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)I blame a lot of it on television, Murphy Brown, and the liberals in Hollyweird.
Roseanne Barr - MK ULTRA Rules In Hollywood
EXCERPT...
Hollywood is the one that keeps all of this power structure. They perpetuate the culture of racism, sexism, classism, genderism and keep it all in place. They continue to feed it, and they make a lot of money doing it. They do it at the behest of their masters, who run everything.
I speak on behalf of Hollywood. I go to parties, Oscar parties and things like that and big stars pull me aside, take my arm and whisper: I just want to thank you for the things you say. And it blows my mind, but thats the culture, its a culture of fear.
99Forever
(14,524 posts)... and he's a racist!
... and our FREEDUMBS!
(For the really clueless.)
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Disinformation. Misinformation. Black Information. The possibilities are endless, now that it's legal for the government to lie to the American people.
U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans
Posted By John Hudson
Foreign Police.com, Sunday, July 14, 2013
For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?
Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It's viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran, self-immolation in Tibet, human trafficking across Asia, and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.
The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long-standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 1970s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they "should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics." Fulbright's amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who argued that such "propaganda" should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. "from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity."
Zorinsky and Fulbright sold their amendments on sensible rhetoric: American taxpayers shouldn't be funding propaganda for American audiences. So did Congress just tear down the American public's last defense against domestic propaganda?
SNIP...
This partially explains the push to allow BBG broadcasts on local radio stations in the United States. The agency wants to reach diaspora communities, such as St. Paul, Minnesota's significant Somali expat community. "Those people can get al-Shabab, they can get Russia Today, but they couldn't get access to their taxpayer-funded news sources like VOA Somalia," the source said. "It was silly."
CONTINUED...
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/12/us_backs_off_propaganda_ban_spreads_government_made_news_to_americans
Police State USA USA USA!
AzDar
(14,023 posts)AnotherMcIntosh
(11,064 posts)If the sheep won't push back against that outrageous assault on privacy and dignity, they won't push back against the spying by their own government.
Edward R. Murrow: "A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
snappyturtle
(14,656 posts)what you have provided with the links is outstanding. Kudos!
I see I have lots to read...bookmarking.