Dep Asst Defence Sectry 4 Detainee Affairs says 'Close Gitmo NOW', resigns. Consciences catching up?

Deputy Assistant Defence Secretary for Detainee Affairs

Why we should shut down Guantanamo: Prison camp's jailer-in-chief makes jaw-dropping U-turn and says it should never have been built

-- William Lietzau had key role in creating Guantanamo under George Bush
-- He has now argued the detention camp should never have been built
-- He said detainees should have been PoW's and held in Afghanistan
-- If charged, they should have been taken to American prisons, he said

President Obama will not meet with Vladimir Putin on Russia trip if no change in Snowden saga

Update to add video link: video here http://presspass.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/04/19863000-watch-meet-the-press-august-4-2013?lite

The video link also covers Kentuck's thread "Sen. Saxby Chambliss makes jaw-dropping accusation against Senator Ron Wyden"

Nobel Peace Prize Recipient & going to Oslo with petition signed by 100,000+ to nominate Manning

Give Manning and Snowden the Nobel Peace Prize

Saturday, Aug 3, 2013 10:15 AM

If the Nobel committee had any guts, it would honor America's leakers and deliver a smackdown to the security state
By Andrew O'Hehir


Give Manning and Snowden the Nobel Peace PrizeBradley Manning (Credit: AP/Patrick Semansky)

In an op-ed for the Guardian earlier this summer, Máiread Corrigan Maguire, an Irish activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 and has devoted her life to working for peace in Northern Ireland and around the world, explained why she is nominating Bradley Manning for this year’s prize. American activist and journalist Norman Solomon followed up on this in a USA Today article this week, just after Manning’s conviction on espionage charges. Solomon announced that he will go to Oslo with a petition signed by more than 100,000 people urging the Nobel committee to award Manning the peace prize.

I think it’s a great idea, and if the Nobel committee weren’t so cautious and lily-livered – and were actually interested in furthering the cause of peace – it might actually happen. Since the real goal here is a worldwide public education campaign or an act of resistance, it might be even better if we folded in Swedish academic Stefan Svallfors’ nomination of Manning’s fellow leaker Edward Snowden, who was just granted temporary asylum in Russia. The Nobel committee could undo years of boring and/or insulting choices, just like that. Give the Nobel Peace Prize to Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden.

Can you even imagine how outraged, how red-faced and apoplectic, John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Dianne Feinstein and the talking heads on the Sunday news shows would be? It would partly make up for the profound shame of having given the prize to Henry Kissinger, one of the 20th century’s great war criminals, in 1973. And then there was what Svallfors calls the “hasty and ill-considered decision” to award it to Barack Obama in 2009. That seemed mysterious at the time – his great accomplishment was that he was a brand new American president who wasn’t George W. Bush – and it looks considerably worse now.

...

How will historians of the future, if there is a future, judge this period, or the importance of the Manning and Snowden leaks? We can’t be sure, but that’s because history is written by the winners, and we don’t know who the winners will be right now. What I do know is that this is a key moment in American history, a moment of rupture and revelation. It’s a “whose side are you on?” moment, when the methods and goals of the governing elite and its media boosters – whatever political labels they may apply to themselves – are shown to be very different from their surface ideology, and to have little or nothing to do with “democracy.” It’s a moment when the convenient fiction that underlies all of American politics, the idea that the government represents the people, is exposed as a lie.

...

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/give_manning_and_snowden_the_nobel_peace_prize/

Detroit's median household income is now LESS THAN HALF what it was in 1970

British Companies Give GCHQ Unlimited Access to Data on Undersea Fiber Optic Cables

BT and Vodafone among telecoms companies passing details to GCHQ

Fears of customer backlash over breach of privacy as firms give GCHQ unlimited access to their undersea cables

James Ball, Luke Harding and Juliette Garside
The Guardian, Friday 2 August 2013 13.36 EDT


Verizon, BT and Vodafone Cable have given GCHQ secret unlimited access to their network of undersea cables. Photograph: composite

Some of the world's leading telecoms firms, including BT and Vodafone, are secretly collaborating with Britain's spy agency GCHQ, and are passing on details of their customers' phone calls, email messages and Facebook entries, documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden show.

BT, Vodafone Cable, and the American firm Verizon Business – together with four other smaller providers – have given GCHQ secret unlimited access to their network of undersea cables. The cables carry much of the world's phone calls and internet traffic.

...

The revelations are likely to dismay GCHQ and Downing Street, who are fearful that BT and the other firms will suffer a backlash from customers furious that their private data and intimate emails have been secretly passed to a government spy agency. In June a source with knowledge of intelligence said the companies had no choice but to co-operate in this operation. They are forbidden from revealing the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables.

...
The document identified for the first time which telecoms companies are working with GCHQ's "special source" team. It gives top secret codenames for each firm, with BT ("Remedy&quot , Verizon Business ("Dacron&quot , and Vodafone Cable ("Gerontic&quot . The other firms include Global Crossing ("Pinnage&quot , Level 3 ("Little&quot , Viatel ("Vitreous&quot and Interoute ("Streetcar&quot . The companies refused to comment on any specifics relating to Tempora, but several noted they were obliged to comply with UK and EU law.

...

This operation is carried out under clandestine agreements with the seven companies, described in one document as "intercept partners". The companies are paid for logistical and technical assistance.

...

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/02/telecoms-bt-vodafone-cables-gchq

Bradley Manning’s conviction sends a chilling message

Bradley Manning’s conviction sends a chilling message


By Jesselyn Radack, Published: August 2

Jesselyn Radack is the National Security & Human Rights Director of the Government Accountability Project.

In 1971, Richard Nixon’s administration charged Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, the men who leaked the classified Pentagon Papers, under the Espionage Act. The case was eventually dismissed due to government misconduct. With the guilty verdict against Pfc. Bradley Manning, President Obama has won what Nixon could not: an Espionage Act conviction against a government employee accused of mishandling classified information. Obama’s administration has relied heavily on the draconian World War I-era law — meant for prosecuting spies, not whistleblowers — in its ruthless, unprecedented war on “leaks,” invoking it seven times (more than all other U.S. presidents combined) to go after people who reveal information embarrassing to the United States, or, worse, that exposes its crimes.

Until this week, this extreme crackdown had failed. I represent two of the whistleblowers whom the Obama administration at one time charged with espionage: former National Security Agency senior executive Thomas Drake and former CIA agent John Kiriakou. Not coincidentally, they exposed two of the biggest government scandals of the Bush administration — secret domestic surveillance and torture, respectively.

A little-known fact is that the government ended up dropping all espionage charges in both cases. In contrast, this did not happen in the case of Manning: A military judge convicted him on six espionage counts, among other charges. A key difference is that Manning’s trial occurred in a court-martial, significant parts of which were conducted in secret. The trial was barely covered by most media outlets, and those that did cover it closely were thwarted at every step by restrictive, arbitrary and ever-changing press rules from the Army’s Public Affairs Office. Thus the government was able to avoid the public and media scrutiny that assisted Drake and Kiriakou.

...

In this case, the people being prosecuted are those who disclosed fraud, waste, abuse and illegality of the highest order for the purpose of benefitting the public. It sends the most chilling of messages to jail truth-tellers and dissenters, essential actors in maintaining an informed citizenry, which lies at the heart of a free and open democratic society. After all, in our grand experiment with democracy, the people are supposed to control the government, not the other way around. The work of the government is supposed to be public and people’s personal lives private, not the other way around. There are a number of brave souls trying to correct the trajectory of decline that our country is on. Public servants should not have to choose their conscience over their careers, and especially their very freedom.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jesselyn-radack-bradley-mannings-conviction-sends-a-chilling-message/2013/08/02/aaf5865e-facd-11e2-a369-d1954abcb7e3_story.html

Raiding the "Corporate Store": The NSA's Unfettered Access to a Vast Pool of Americans' Phone Data

08/02/2013



Raiding the "Corporate Store": The NSA's Unfettered Access to a Vast Pool of Americans' Phone Data
By Patrick C. Toomey, Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 10:10am

The director of National Intelligence declassified three documents on Wednesday related to the NSA's mass collection of Americans' telephone records. One of these — a so-called "primary order" issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) — describes in new detail the rules that the NSA must follow when it collects and queries this trove of sensitive telephone data. What it reveals is not reassuring. Despite intelligence officials' repeated assertions that their access to Americans' phone records is extremely limited and tightly controlled, the primary order suggests NSA analysts can sift through far more telephone data — with far fewer restrictions — than government officials have let on in public. In particular, the primary order shows that NSA analysts have unfettered access to a pool of telephone data called the "corporate store," which likely contains millions of Americans' calling records.

Intelligence officials have repeatedly said that the NSA queries its call-records database only when there is "reasonable suspicion, based on specific and articulated facts" that an identifier — such as a telephone number — is linked to specific foreign terrorist organizations. They have frequently cited one statistic to back up these assertions: According to officials, the NSA queried fewer than 300 unique identifiers under this program in 2012.

As we have pointed out, though, even if the government ran queries on only 300 unique identifiers in 2012, those searches implicated the privacy of millions of Americans. Intelligence officials have explained that analysts are permitted to examine the call records of all individuals within three "hops" of a specific target. As a result, a query yields call information not only about the individual thought to be associated with a specific foreign terrorist organization, but about all of those separated from that individual by one, two, or three degrees. Even if one assumes, conservatively, that each person has an average of 40 unique contacts, an analyst who accessed the records of everyone within three hops of an initial target would have accessed records concerning more than two million people. Multiply that figure by the 300 phone numbers the NSA says that it searched in 2012, and by the seven years the program has apparently been in place, and it quickly becomes clear that official efforts to characterize the extent and impact of this program are deeply misleading.

This much we've known for several weeks. But thanks to the documents released yesterday, we now have a better idea about what happens to the information that's pulled up through queries. All of this information, the primary order says, is dumped into something called the "corporate store." Incredibly, the FISC imposes no restrictions on what analysts may subsequently do with the information. The FISC's primary order contains a crucially revealing footnote stating that "the Court understands that NSA may apply the full range of SIGINT analytic tradecraft to the result of intelligence analysis queries of the collected (telephone) metadata." In short, once a calling record is added to the corporate store, anything goes.

More troubling, if the government is combining the results of all its queries in this "corporate store," as seems likely, then it has a massive pool of telephone data that it can analyze in any way it chooses, unmoored from the specific investigations that gave rise to the initial queries. To put it in individual terms: If, for some reason, your phone number happens to be within three hops of an NSA target, all of your calling records may be in the corporate store, and thus available for any NSA analyst to search at will.

But it's even worse than that. The primary order prominently states that whenever the government accesses the wholesale telephone-metadata database, "an auditable record of the activity shall be generated." It might feel fairly comforting to know that, if the government abuses its access to all Americans' call data, it might eventually be called to account—until you read footnote 6 of the primary order, which exempts entirely the government's use of the "corporate store" from the audit-trail requirement.

The FISC's rules provide the appearance of limited and targeted access to Americans' phone records — but the reality is far different. When a single query is, in fact, a three-hop frolic through American's phone records, the initial restraints lose much of their force. And, when the NSA can combine the results of all these queries for future, unrestricted analysis, the FISC's front-end protections have almost no significance at all. The weakness of the back-end controls renders the front-end protections all but irrelevant.

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http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/raiding-corporate-store-nsas-unfettered-access-vast-pool-americans-phone-data

Some analysts & Congressional officials suggested Friday that emphasizing a terrorist threat now...

Ex-F.B.I. Agent Is Charged In Plot to Sell Documents

Ex-F.B.I. Agent Is Charged In Plot to Sell Documents
By BENJAMIN WEISER
Published: August 2, 2013

...

The former agent, Robert Lustyik, was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in late 2011 when he began plotting with a friend, Johannes Thaler, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday in Federal District Court in White Plains, N.Y.

“I will work my magic .... We r sooooooo close,” Agent Lustyik wrote in an exchange of text messages with Mr. Thaler, the complaint said.

“I know,” Mr. Thaler replied. “It’s all right here in front of us. Pretty soon we’ll be having lunch in our oceanfront restaurant.”

The Bangladeshi who had sought the materials, Rizve Ahmed, paid a total of $1,000 to Mr. Lustyik and Mr. Thaler for two F.B.I. documents concerning Mr. Ahmed’s political rival, the complaint said. One was a suspicious activity report; the other was a memo about the man that mentioned $300 million, the complaint said without elaboration. The men planned to seek tens of thousands of dollars in additional bribes for other confidential information, the complaint said.

The complaint did not identify the rival, whom the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, described as “a prominent citizen of Bangladesh who was affiliated with an opposing political party” of Mr. Ahmed’s.

...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/nyregion/former-fbi-agent-charged-in-a-plot-to-sell-documents.html

Bradley Manning & The Deepwater Horizon

Bradley Manning & The Deepwater Horizon

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

By Greg Palast