Liz Cheney To Challenge Mike Enzi In 2014
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
if mitch mcconnell hadn't declared a goal of making obama a one turn president and he, and boehner reducing the congress and senate into the most ineffective EVER.
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There was nothing new about that - That's what Republicans have been doing for decades. They play hardball and they play for keeps. I can't even fault Republican politicians for it - Their constituents put them into power to achieve their goals. It's just Democratic voters who accept short shrift, are ok with getting sold down the river, because their elected representatives played 'nice' and wouldn't get in the dirt with Republicans.
How anybody could have lived through the past several decades and not know that is beyond me. They kept the nation hostage for years impeaching a president over a blow j0b. In spite of the fact that they knew they would take in poll ratings and at the ballot box, that the nation did not support their impeaching Clinton. That's what Republicans do.
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Liz Cheney To Challenge Mike Enzi In 2014
The situation might have been remedied had Democrats and Obama come into office investigating and prosecuting the Bush administration and restoring the 'rule of law'. BushCheney exploited the inherent weaknesses in the Constitution: A precarious balance of power between the three branches of government. But Obama refused, and has continued the BushCheney disregard of the Constitution, even going beyond BushCheney abuses.
We got off on a wrong turn in this country, not just once but at many important junctions throughout our 200 plus years, but never always with the possibility of enough lead time to rectify and change course. When it comes to a Supreme Court decision, some say, "Oh it's not a big deal, it's just one decision, unlikely to affect much." That one decision, Bush v. Gore, has set the course for the demise of human civilization on the planet within my children's lifetime. By giving the election to Bush and Cheney with all the power that went with it, a set of actions have been put into place which spell the end game for ecosystems around the world as well as political systems.
If it sounds like I'm speaking in extremes, apocalyptic, yes, I am. The extremes were are facing include monetary (another worldwide Great Depression, beyond the last one because the planet doesn't have the raw materials to build on like the last one), energy that is too dangerous to handle (nuclear and gasoline, destroying the environment and making it impossible for humans to survive), extreme weather, food and water shortages, pandemic diseases, anarchy in the streets.
When you don't right the wrongs in history, they have a funny way of coming back to cause mayhem all over again.
The Bushes, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, et al, all happened because Nixon was pardoned, not tried. Had Clinton investigated and prosecuted George H.W. Bush over Iran-Contra, his son and Dick Cheney never would have gotten into the White House. Jeb Bush and Liz Cheney would never have the political futures like the ones they're about to have because Obama decided to "look forward, not back".
With investigations and transparency, the CIA (and the latest revelations about the NSA) would have been dismantled, the buildings burned to ashes and the ground upon which it stood salted. Instead, this is our future (The Lily-Pad Strategy: How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War) and it's making us more loathed and unsafe than any time in our history.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Liz Cheney To Challenge Mike Enzi In 2014
The Democrats' refusal to enforce the rule of law (an extraordinary admission by Pelosi a couple of weeks ago, particularly as she admitted it as the reason that Republicans shouldn't uphold rule of law by holding Holder in contempt - "Nancy Pelosi Slams Contempt Vote: 'I Could Have Arrested Karl Rove ... But We Didn't') is now a bipartisan agreement that we're no longer a nation of laws.
At the very root of our problems are Constitutional crises created by, first, Republican presidents and now under a Democratic president. Republicans' utter contempt for the Constitution and callous disregard for creating them caused by Democrats' cowering response is what underpins all of our problems and what's destroying the country.
As president, you've got to really want the US to work, to exist, to not exploit the loopholes in the Constitution that keep our three-branches of government precariously balancing the democracy. But BushCheney drove tanks through the loopholes, breaking the law and with no apparent concern for exposing the loopholes or any consequences.
Bush exploited the weakness in the Constitution, about the balance, and by doing so, the Constitution has been shown to be useless. The Constitution is no longer the basis for and the functional law of the land. The Constitution is no longer much respected in Congress, the Executive Branch, the SupremeCourt, nor in law or business.
Bush wasn't the first to create Constitutional crises, but he created more of them, eviscerating the Constitution for all time. How do you go forward with it when its Achilles' heel has been laid bare for any BushCheney wannabe waiting in the weeds to exploit? What's now happened in the aftermath of BushCheney is that what Nixon did has been made legal. Once BushCheney happened, once they exploited those loopholes for everyone to see, you can't just go on as if it never happened. You can't "look forward, not back".
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Liz Cheney To Challenge Mike Enzi In 2014
The democrats thought when Obama was elected to let the past lie and move forward together as a country. Unfortunately, republicans from day one have decided to move backward.
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That's a sweet and naive notion, about Democrats and about how professional politicians operate. Talk of Democratic politicians having no spines are greatly exaggerated, just like Obama's timidity is myth: He's plenty tough when it comes to standing up to the Democratic base. Democratic voters have mistakenly believed that Obama and Democrats want what they want. The DLC-controlled DemocraticParty gives lip service to all populist issues (like jobs, civil rights protections, restoring habeas corpus, ending the wars, public healthcare, WallStreet reform, environmental and energy issues, etc.).
If the Bush years taught us anything, it's that anyone can sell anything to Americans, if you're stolid and relentless in your sales pitch and tactics. It's not that Bush and Rove were geniuses and knew something that nobody else knew; Bush and Rove were just more ruthless in doing what politicians and the parties had gone to great lengths to hide from Americans -- If you keep at it, escalate your attacks, don't take 'no' for an answer, never back away, you'll wear the opposition down.
Obama didn't get to be the first black president, vanquish Clinton's machine (to get the nomination) and the oldest, most experienced politicians in US history (including the RoveMachine) by not having mastered these skills. Nor do Democratic politicians (more incumbents than ever, in office longer) not know how to do it. How do you think Democrats managed to keep impeaching BushCheney off the table, have us still reelecting them, not marching on Washington with torches and pitchforks?
Obama and Democrats know how to do it -- They don't want to do it.
The trick for them has been to keep the many different populist groups believing that they really do support our issues, but they're merely inept. And to get us to keep voting for them despite their failure to achieve our alleged shared objectives.
Getting Democratic voters (and Obama's 'most ardent supporters') to understand that Democratic politicians have been taking us all for suckers and patsies is the most immediate problem and the challenge.
KEEP READING
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The End of "Rule of Law" in America
Saturday, July 13, 2013
The Democrats' refusal to enforce the rule of law (an extraordinary admission by Pelosi a couple of weeks ago, particularly as she admitted it as the reason that Republicans shouldn't uphold rule of law by holding Holder in contempt - "Nancy Pelosi Slams Contempt Vote: 'I Could Have Arrested Karl Rove ... But We Didn't') is now a bipartisan agreement that we're no longer a nation of laws.
At the very root of our problems are Constitutional crises created by, first, Republican presidents and now under a Democratic president. Republicans' utter contempt for the Constitution and callous disregard for creating them caused by Democrats' cowering response is what underpins all of our problems and what's destroying the country.
As President, you've got to really want the U.S. to work, to exist, to not exploit the loopholes in the Constitution that keep our three-branches of government precariously balancing the democracy. But Bush-Cheney drove tanks through the loopholes, breaking the law and with no apparent concern for exposing the loopholes nor any consequences.
Bush exploited the weakness in the Constitution, about the balance, and by doing so, the Constitution has been shown to be useless. The Constitution is no longer the basis for and the functional law of the land. The Constitution is no longer much respected in Congress, the Executive branch, the Supreme Court, nor in law or business.
Bush wasn't the first to create Constitutional crises, but he created more of them, eviscerating the Constitution for all time. How do you go forward with it when its Achilles' heel has been laid bare for any Bush-Cheney wannabe waiting in the weeds to exploit? What's now happened in the aftermath of Bush-Cheney is that what Nixon did has been made legal. Once Bush-Cheney happened, once they exploited those loopholes for everyone to see, you can't just go on as if it never happened. You can't "look forward, not back".
The situation might have been remedied had Democrats and Obama come into office investigating and prosecuting the Bush administration and restoring the 'rule of law'. BushCheney exploited the inherent weaknesses in the Constitution: A precarious balance of power between the three branches of government. But Obama refused, and has continued the Bush-Cheney disregard of the Constitution, even going beyond Bush-Cheney abuses.
We got off on a wrong turn in this country, not just once but at many important junctions throughout our 200 plus years, but never always with the possibility of enough lead time to rectify and change course. When it comes to a Supreme Court decision, some say, "Oh it's not a big deal, it's just one decision, unlikely to affect much." That one decision, Bush v. Gore, has set the course for the demise of human civilization on the planet within my children's lifetime. By giving the election to Bush and Cheney with all the power that went with it, a set of actions have been put into place which spell the end game for ecosystems around the world as well as political systems.
If it sounds like I'm speaking in extremes, apocalyptic, yes, I am. The extremes were are facing include monetary (another worldwide Great Depression, beyond the last one because the planet doesn't have the raw materials to build on like the last one), energy that is too dangerous to handle (nuclear and gasoline, destroying the environment and making it impossible for humans to survive), extreme weather, food and water shortages, pandemic diseases, anarchy in the streets.
When you don't right the wrongs in history, they have a funny way of coming back to cause mayhem all over again.
The Bushes, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, et al, all happened because Nixon was pardoned, not tried. Had Clinton investigated and prosecuted George H.W. Bush over Iran-Contra, his son and Dick Cheney never would have gotten into the White House. Jeb Bush and Liz Cheney would never have the political futures like the ones they're about to have because Obama decided to "look forward, not back".
With investigations and transparency, the CIA (and the latest revelations about the NSA) would have been dismantled, the buildings burned to ashes and the ground upon which it stood salted. Instead, this is our future - “The Lily-Pad Strategy: How the Pentagon is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War” and it's making us more loathed and unsafe than any time in our history.
Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request
Monday, July 1, 2013
Look, you sound like the typical rightwinger who are trying to create their scandal theories. thanks for your opinions, but they are totally irrelevent. i don't believe a word of it. So, you can tell it to the rest of your teapub pals....
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I'm an old, OLD liberal Democrat. I've never voted for a Republican, never will, but I can honestly say that I can't imagine ever voting for a Democrat again. There is NOTHING that Republicans have managed to do in the last forty years that wasn't done with Democrats coming on board. When Democratic politicians' and Obama's 'most ardent fans' talk about voting for him/them because he and they are "the lesser evil", I ask "On what issue?"
When women can no longer get an abortion in 92% of the counties in the US, what difference does it make which party is in power? Those who are past menopause or can afford to send our daughters and granddaughters to Paris for an abortion.
When Obama and Democrats practice Republican foreign policy (expanding wars and codifying neverending war in which to justify removing Americans' Constitutional rights, etc.), what difference does it make which party is in power?
When Tim Geithner/Henry Paulson or some other Wall Streeter would be the Treasury Secretary under either a Republican or Democratic president, what difference does it make which party is in power?
When neither party has on its agenda getting money out of politics, eliminating corporate personhood, publicly funding elections, etc., then both parties are protecting the status quo.
When both parties kick "hot potato" issues that are wrecking the lives or ordinary people down the road or to the states or to the courts yet always manage to meet corporate lobbyists' demands, it really doesn't matter which party gets into power.
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Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Actually, the NSA is a criminal operation. As far as it stopping "over twenty terrorist attacks around the world", there's some discrepancy about that. Not just the number, or if any, but whether good old-fashioned detective work would have succeeded. We know for certain that the Boston Marathon bombing was yet another failure by our government to prevent what was preventable.
Unlike you, I'm a patriotic American unconstrained by allegiance to one political party over another. Your "Democrats = Good, Republicans = Bad" mentality seems to keep you locked into the 'Forever War' mind-set launched by Cheney- Bush and continuing under Obama. Anyone still believing it's a "my team versus your team" (Republican versus Democrat) thing has his head up his rectvm.
D & R poIiticians are not each others' enemles, not as they have voters believing them to be. Like Coke and Pepsi are enemies until they have to put someone out of business. Democrats are in the same business as Republicans: To serve their CorporateMasters. They're all just career politicians, not wedded to a particular ideological perspective but "getting a deal and then selling, spinning it, crafting a sales pitch to constituents that it's great".
Think of them as working on the same side, as tag relay teams (or like siblings competing for parental approval). 'Good cop/bad cop'. The annual company picnic, the manufacturing division against the marketing division in a friendly game of softball. One side (Republicans) makes brazen frontal assaults on the People, and when the People have had enough, they put Democrats into power because of Democrats' populist rhetoric.
Once in power, Democrats consolidate Republicans' gains from previous years, then continue on with Republican policies but renamed, with new advertising campaigns. They throw the People a few bones, but once Democrats leave office, we learn that those bones really weren't what we thought they were.
Whenever the People get wise to the shenanigans and all the different ways they've been tricked, when the People start seeing Democrats as no different than Republicans, Democrats switch the strategy. They invent new reasons for failing to achieve the People's business.
Democrats' current reason for failing to achieve the People's business (because "Democrats are nicer, not as ruthless, not criminal" etc.) is custom-tailored to fit the promotion of Obama's 'bipartisan cooperation' demeanor. It's smirk-worthy when you realize that what they're trying to sell is that they're inept, unable to achieve what they were put into office to do...And their ineptitude, like that's somehow "a good thing".
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
NSA Slides Explain The PRISM Data-Collection Program
I agree. They're even implementing that old favorite of totalitarian states, "Get people to inform on each other." I think that one goes back to the Roman empire, when the Romans didn't have enough Romans to police the people in the other countries they occupied they rewarded foreign civilians who informed on their friends, families and neighbors. And variations on that theme - Instead of repealing the Patriot Act and dismantling the FISA courts and the NSA, the NSA is instituting a 'buddy system' to prevent a repeat of Edward Snowden.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request
If snowden, assange or marcospinelli want to spin the idea that the US is more intrusive
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When I (or Snowden and Assange) try to make that argument, we'll talk. Until then, please don't try to misdirect attention. Aren't we supposed to be better than Russia and China and Ecuador anyway? That was a rhetorical question; let's not waste people's time and attention arguing it. What the NSA is up to is both illegal and unConstitutional. The people of Russia, China and Ecuador can deal with whatever illegal and unConstitutional violations by their governments.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost Read more...
Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request
By the way, genius, when you attempt to use a French word like "voila", you need to figure out how to spell it correctly so you won't make such a fool of yourself by spelling it "walla"! What a hilarious spelling by a semi-literate schlemiel!! LOL!
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The light blue colored text means that it's a hyperlink. Click on it and you'll discover that it's not my words and spelling you're ridiculing, but someone else's. How classy of you. Not. Do you try to humiliate people who lisp or walk with a limp, too?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request
Saturday, June 29, 2013
The administration hides the extent of its “incidental” surveillance of Americans behind fuzzy language. When Congress reauthorized the law at the end of 2012, legislators said Americans had nothing to worry about because the surveillance could not “target” American citizens or permanent residents. Mr. Clapper offered the same assurances. Based on these statements, an ordinary citizen might think the N.S.A. cannot read Americans’ e-mails or online chats under the F.A.A. But that is a government fed misunderstanding.
A “target” under the act is a person or entity the government wants information on — not the people the government is trying to listen to. It’s actually O.K. under the act to grab Americans’ messages so long as they are communicating with the target, or anyone who is not in the United States.
Leave aside the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act for a moment, and turn to the Constitution.
The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government’s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans’ communications.
The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties.
This hairsplitting is inimical to privacy and contrary to what at least five justices ruled just last year in a case called United States v. Jones. One of the most conservative justices on the Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that where even public information about individuals is monitored over the long term, at some point, government crosses a line and must comply with the protections of the Fourth Amendment. That principle is, if anything, even more true for Americans’ sensitive non-public information like phone metadata and social networking activity.
We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/the-criminal-nsa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request
Let’s turn to Prism: the streamlined, electronic seizure of communications from Internet companies. In combination with what we have already learned about the N.S.A.’s access to telecommunications and Internet infrastructure, Prism is further proof that the agency is collecting vast amounts of emails and other messages — including communications to, from and between Americans.
The government justifies Prism under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Section 1881a of the act gave the president broad authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance. If the attorney general and the director of national intelligence certify that the purpose of the monitoring is to collect foreign intelligence information about any non-American individual or entity not known to be in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can require companies to provide access to Americans’ international communications. The court does not approve the target or the facilities to be monitored, nor does it assess whether the government is doing enough to minimize the intrusion, correct for collection mistakes and protect privacy. Once the court issues a surveillance order, the government can issue top-secret directives to Internet companies like Google and Facebook to turn over calls, emails, video and voice chats, photos, voiceover IP calls (like Skype) and social networking information.
Like the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act gives the government very broad surveillance authority. And yet the Prism program appears to outstrip that authority. In particular, the government “may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States.”
The government knows that it regularly obtains Americans’ protected communications. The Washington Post reported that Prism is designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness” — as John Oliver of “The Daily Show” put it, “a coin flip plus 1 percent.” By turning a blind eye to the fact that 49-plus percent of the communications might be purely among Americans, the N.S.A. has intentionally acquired information it is not allowed to have, even under the terrifyingly broad auspices of the FISA Amendments Act.
How could vacuuming up Americans’ communications conform with this legal limitation? Well, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Andrea Mitchell of NBC, the N.S.A. uses the word “acquire” only when it pulls information out of its gigantic database of communications and not when it first intercepts and stores the information.
If there’s a law against torturing the English language, James Clapper is in real trouble.
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Glenn Greenwald: NSA Can Store A Billion Cell Phone Calls Every Day
Yes. And we really don't have to look too hard to find instances of it happening already.
Do you remember back when BushCo was beating the drum for war against Iraq, he wanted the AUMF from Congress along with a UN seal of approval, do you recall that story about John Bolton having ordered intercepts on Colin Powell's phone calls? There was talk that Bolton was reporting back to Bush-Cheney that Powell was sabotaging their war effort with backdoor phone conversations with other nations' UN ambassadors. That's why you don't want an NSA capable of doing this to the People's representatives to Congress and the White House.
Connect NSA Wiretapping dots -- Bolton used NSA to spy on Powell - Democratic Underground
Then there was Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee for six months when he sat down to a secret briefing on July 17, 2003. What he heard alarmed him so much that immediately afterward he wrote two identical letters, by hand, expressing his concerns.
He sent one to Cheney and placed the other -- as he pointedly warned Cheney he would -- in a safe in case anyone in the future might challenge his version of what happened.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/19/AR2005121901641.html
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
Thursday, June 27, 2013
One was a terrorist, the other were accidental, apparently.=================================
"One was a terrorist" and "the other(s) were accidental, apparently"?
Seriously?
One was a terrorist, according to whom? By what evidence?
And "accidentally"?
It was your mother/sister/brother/father/son/cousin/husband/wife. Does it still make no difference to you? When their loved ones decide they want an eye for an eye, and take you or more of your loved ones out, you still going to be so casual about it?
In the United States, we operate under RULE OF LAW. Rule of law isn't that a president can decide in secret who he is going to kill. The rule of law doesn't allow for him to choose, in secret, which American he is going to put the full force of the U.S. military against and murder.
http://www.jeffhead.com/liberty/flagdistress.htm
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Vladimir Putin: Edward Snowden Still In Moscow Airport Transit Zone, Won't Be Extradited
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Has it really not occurred to you that the distribution of wealth, both here in the United States and beyond that, around the world, and how the concentration of wealth has increased exponentially in the past few years, isn't just a craps shoot? That it's the result of what these intelligence agencies are up to?
I don't know why you would defend this system unless you were one of those getting paid off (politicians, bankers, et al).
The richest 1% in the US aren't sharing their winnings with us. They're imposing austerity, where we the peons people are picking up the tab for their corporate wars for resources while the rich and corporate are offshoring profits, and pushing more and more of us into poverty. They're not creating jobs for us. They're not shoring up our infrastructure. They're putting the squeeze on us. Making education farther out of our reach. They're not making us safer from attacks. By having so many people unemployed, particularly young men, they're actually manufacturing the circumstances from which home-grown radicals are born.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
Blackmail by RichardRaznikov
Do you remember back when BushCo was beating the drum for war against Iraq, he wanted the AUMF from Congress along with a UN seal of approval, do you recall that story about John Bolton having ordered intercepts on Colin Powell's phone calls? There was talk that Bolton was reporting back to Bush-Cheney that Powell was sabotaging their war effort with backdoor phone conversations with other nations' UN ambassadors. That's why you don't want an NSA capable of doing this to the People's representatives to Congress and the White House.
Connect NSA Wiretapping dots -- Bolton used NSA to spy on Powell - Democratic Underground
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
"9/11! 9/11! 9/11!"
If I didn't know better I'd swear it was 9/12/01, BushCheney were still in office and we were preparing to go to war in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq.
The same problem that existed back then, that enabled 19 men, mostly Saudis, to hijack 4 planes and fly them into the WTC exists today. It wasn't a lack of intelligence but the failure of the government to act on it. The proof we have is the Boston Marathon bombing just over two months ago. US authorities were tipped to the Tarnaev brothers and did nothing.
The massive surveillance apparatus over Americans has nothing to do with keeping Americans safe from attack. That's really not what our government does, and if you'd ever lost a loved one through a terror attack you'd know that. The only time the government gets involved is when it threatens commerce. Do you recall Bush in the first days after 9/11? "Go shopping".
What's really going on -
Another NSA whistleblower RussTice claims key government figures, including president Obama and numerous others have been under surveillance. A massive potential exists of NSA to blackmail political figures, judges, lawyers, CEOs and etc. to manipulate the US domestic and foreign policies, judicial system, legislatures, media, corporations, banks and so on might have already done grave damages to achieve crucial military and corporate agendas.
“Don’t tell me there’s no abuse because I had this stuff in my hands, I looked at it. In some cases I was literally involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. I had my hand literally on the paperwork. They went after members of Congress, Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence and ArmedServices committees, the judicial committee, but they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers, law firms, judges. They went after StateDepartment officials… They went after US international corporations, US banking firms, financial firms. They went after NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like the RedCross and people like that, that go overseas and do humanitarian work…"
“I can give you names of a bunch of different people they went after that I saw, the names, phone numbers of congress people and not only them, what looked like staff people, too......Not only their congressional offices, their home state offices. It's incredible what NSA’s done. They turned themselves into a rogue agency that has JEdgarHoover capabilities on a monstrous scale, on steroids.”
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Says He Sought Booz Allen Hamilton Job To Gather NSA Surveillance Evidence
Monday, June 24, 2013
Greenwald: "If your motive had been to harm the United States and help its enemies or if your motive had been personal material gain were there things you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn't end up doing?"
Snowden: "Oh absolutely. Anyone in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that I had could suck out secrets, pass them on the open market to Russia; they always have an open door as we do. I had access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all over the world. The locations of every station, we have what their missions are and so forth."
"If I had just wanted to harm the US? You could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. But that's not my intention. I think for anyone making that argument they need to think, if they were in my position and you live a privileged life, you're living in Hawaii, in paradise, and making a ton of money, 'What would it take you to leave everything behind?'"
"The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests."
"And the months ahead, the years ahead it's only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather then a stipulation of law. And because of that a new leader will be elected, they'll find the switch, say that 'Because of the crisis, because of the dangers we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power.' And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny."
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Says He Sought Booz Allen Hamilton Job To Gather NSA Surveillance Evidence
Why don't you print the entire quote?:
"I did not release them earlier because I don't want to simply dump huge amounts of documents without regard to their content," he said. "I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists."
Snowden also signaled his intention to leak more of those documents at a later date.
"If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of U.S. network operations against their people should be published," he said.
It's no different than what he said days ago:
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Says He Sought Booz Allen Hamilton Job To Gather NSA Surveillance Evidence
NSA Whistleblower Goes on Record -Reveals New Information & Names Culprits
This should be widely shared. It looks like the massive potential of NSA to blackmail political figures, judges, lawyers, CEOs and etc. to manipulate the US domestic and foreign policies, judicial system, legislatures, media, corporations, banks and so on might have already done grave damages to achieve crucial military and corporate agendas. An NSA whistleblower RussTice claims key government figures, including president Obama and numerous others have been under surveillance.
“I had my hand literally on the paperwork,” he told PeterB. Collins. “They went after members of Congress, Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence and ArmedServices committees, the judicial committee, but they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers, law firms, judges. They went after StateDepartment officials… They went after US international corporations, US banking firms, financial firms. They went after NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like the RedCross and people like that, that go overseas and do humanitarian work…
“Don’t tell me there’s no abuse because I had this stuff in my hands, I looked at it. In some cases I was literally involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. When I said to KeithOlbermann, my thing is high tech, the other thing is the dragnet… the terrestrial dragnet. Well, my specialty is outer space, I deal with satellites, everything that goes in and out of space, I did my spying, that’s how I found out about this.”
Question: this creates the potential for massive blackmail…
“Absolutely. I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on. I haven’t given you any names. This was in the summer of 2004. One of the papers I had in my hands was a bunch of numbers associated with a forty-something wanna-be Senator from Illinois, that’s who they went after…
“I can give you names of a bunch of different people they went after that I saw, the names and phone numbers of congress people and not only them, what looked like staff people, too, and not only their congressional offices, their home state offices. It's incredible what NSA’s done. They turned themselves into a rogue agency that has JEdgarHoover capabilities on a monstrous scale, on steroids.”
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/06/19/podcast-show-112-nsa-whistleblower-goes-on-record-reveals-new-information-names-culprits/
Blackmail by RichardRaznikov
http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2013/06/20/blackmail-16146634/
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Says He Sought Booz Allen Hamilton Job To Gather NSA Surveillance Evidence
Just one day after the Inauguration, RussellTice, the NSA whistleblower who originally participated in that agency's illegal warrantless wiretapping program, and revealed details of same to the NewYorkTimes' back in late 2005, has now come forward with more details that he'd been disinclined to release previously (he had been, after all, hounded by the FBI, subpoenaed by a grand jury, etc. after his original, heroic revelations.)
He spoke yesterday on MSNBC, revealing that American journalists were targeted by Bush's program which "had access to all Americans' communications." Please watch the remarkable video interview at right. Both that, and the text below, is from RAW STORY's coverage last night...
"The NationalSecurityAgency had access to all Americans' communications --- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."
"In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them," Tice told Olbermann. "What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year --- and it made no sense. ... I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me."
When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, "An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists."
"To what purpose?" Olbermann asked. "I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the NewYorkTimes? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York?"
Tice didn't answer directly, but simply stated, "If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?_r=1
http://www.peterbcollins.com/newscomment/pbc-news-comment-bombshell-nsa-revelations-from-russell-tice/
http://www.bradblog.com/?cat=108
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/politics/foreign-policy/war-terror/ex-intelligence-agent-russell-tice-says-us-not-telling-truth
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost Read more...
Edward Snowden Says He Sought Booz Allen Hamilton Job To Gather NSA Surveillance Evidence
RussellTice offers additional, startling details on NSA's warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens...
As we've been predicting for some weeks ago, the flood of revelations that would be flowing forth after Obama was sworn in would likely make what we currently know about Bush Era illegalities and incompetence seem like barely the tip of the iceberg.
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
Snowden is a turncoat and a traitor, who BROKE THE LAW HIMSELF.
=============================
If what the NSA and CIA, et al, have been and are doing is legal (not Constitutional, but legal) then what's the problem with the American people knowing about it?
Everybody else seems to.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost Read more...
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
Where were you when the Patriot Act was being debated, probably somewhere cheerleading, now trying to show fake outrage.=======================
Unlike you, I have a long paper trail on the record. Your rant implies I'm somehow a Bushie, when anyone who has been here for longer than 20 minutes knows I'm an old OLD liberal Democrat who has worked for decades trying to hold back the fascist neocons and neolibs who have been controlling our government. I spoke out against the Patriot Act when Joe Biden tried to get it passed into law in 1995. Where were you?
Who are you? How do you possibly defend a president who acts outside the law, renditioning, imprisoning and killing Americans without due process or any oversight?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost Read more...
Edward Snowden Says He Sought Booz Allen Hamilton Job To Gather NSA Surveillance Evidence
Too rarely mentioned is the combination of nonviolence and idealism that has been integral to the courageous whistleblowing by Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning. Right now, one is on a perilous journey across the globe in search of political asylum, while the other is locked up in a prison and confined to a military trial excluding the human dimensions of the case. At a time of Big Brother and endless war, Snowden and Manning have bravely insisted that a truly better world is possible.
Meanwhile, top policymakers in Washington seem bent on running as much of the world as possible.
Their pursuit of Edward Snowden has evolved into a frenzied rage.
Those at the top of the U.S. government insist that Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning have betrayed it. But that’s backward. Putting its money on vast secrecy and military violence instead of democracy, the government has betrayed Snowden and Manning and the rest of us.
Trying to put a stop to all that secrecy and violence, we have no assurance of success. But continuing to try is a prerequisite for realistic hope.
A few months before the invasion of Iraq, looking out at Baghdad from an upper story of a hotel, I thought of something Albert Camus once wrote. “And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.”
Edward Snowden’s honorable course has led him to this historic moment. The U.S. government is eager to pay him back with retribution and solitary. But many people in the United States and around the world are responding with love and solidarity.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
Please, you insult all that have a higher education.
=============================
That would make me self-loathing, and I assure you, I'm hardly that. Except maybe on days when I see the heroisim of someone like Snowden and have to scratch my head to recall the last time I acted with such courage.
You can keep running around like Henny Penny, saying Snowden's put lives in danger, yet you can't name one person that it's true about. Snowden's not made any foreign policy, but your choice of Zbigniew Brezezinski as the north star on the matter tells me you've swallowed the Kool-Aid - You're a good little sock puppet.
Snowden has told us what our government is doing to us, after our government has denied doing it.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost Read more...
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
Guilty until proven innocent? That's not how we do things in this country, although I'm not surprised at your confusion in this matter given as how neocons and neolibs have been ratcheting up the disinformation games. But unless you shake them off, you can't claim to be a patriotic, Constitution-loving American.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Those records are not being outsourced by the government, but by the private sector.===========================
Now that you brought it up, that kind of practice seems like something we should lobby to outlaw, considering how many hackers and identity thieves are foreign.
Finally. Got your attention.
I, and many others, have been warning against this for years. Much of our government's services have been privatized and outsourced, at higher rates than when the government was performing the jobs, with less accountability.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost Read more...
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
And we've got a president who keeps his interpretation of the law secret.
This is as insane as it gets.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
It's NOT legal, ferchrissakes.
And what should really help you see that is both the DNI director and the NSA director LIED to the oversight committees!
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
Edward Snowden, along with others who have access to what the NSA is actually up to, are telling you that our government is not only lying to us, and has been lying to us and those in Congress who are required to oversee the NSA, the NSA and the Obama administration is breaking the law! Both domestic and international law, and they've been doing it all secretly.
We have spent our national treasure, many times over, allegedly in an effort to protect American citizens from the effect that our policies have had on people in other countries. Not the actual policies that the American people believe we have, but the real policies of the U.S. government. Policies that aren't for the benefit of the American people, the 99%, but policies that benefit the 1% and ROB the 99%. Policies that support an oil-based economy, and a corporate food system, to the detriment of Americans' health and the destruction of the environment.
Edward Snowden is a hero and a patriot.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks
Only someone who is paying absolutely NO ATTENTION to the content of Snowden's message, but instead, because she doesn't seem to understand what's wrong with the NSA spying on all Americans, reduces it down to terms that are easy for her to understand ("us" versus "them") would want to consider that at all.
Whatever Snowden's agenda, it wouldn't mean what Obama and the NSA is doing is ok.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden Asylum Request Sent To Ecuador, Official Says
RussellTice offers additional, startling details on NSA's warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens...
As we've been predicting for some weeks ago, the flood of revelations that would be flowing forth after Obama was sworn in would likely make what we currently know about Bush Era illegalities and incompetence seem like barely the tip of the iceberg.
Just one day after the Inauguration, RussellTice, the NSA whistleblower who originally participated in that agency's illegal warrantless wiretapping program, and revealed details of same to the NewYorkTimes' back in late 2005, has now come forward with more details that he'd been disinclined to release previously (he had been, after all, hounded by the FBI, subpoenaed by a grand jury, etc. after his original, heroic revelations.)
He spoke yesterday on MSNBC, revealing that American journalists were targeted by Bush's program which "had access to all Americans' communications." Please watch the remarkable video interview at right. Both that, and the text below, is from RAW STORY's coverage last night...
"The NationalSecurityAgency had access to all Americans' communications --- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."
"In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them," Tice told Olbermann. "What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year --- and it made no sense. ... I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me."
When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, "An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists."
"To what purpose?" Olbermann asked. "I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the NewYorkTimes? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York?"
Tice didn't answer directly, but simply stated, "If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?_r=1
http://www.peterbcollins.com/newscomment/pbc-news-comment-bombshell-nsa-revelations-from-russell-tice/
http://www.bradblog.com/?cat=108
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/politics/foreign-policy/war-terror/ex-intelligence-agent-russell-tice-says-us-not-telling-truth
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost Read more...
Edward Snowden Asylum Request Sent To Ecuador, Official Says
#1 - A majority of Americans did NOT accept a limitation of their freedoms. Most Americans AND members of Congress were like mushrooms (kept in the dark and fed BS) in order to get the Patriot Act, a document written years earlier, passed. Few Americans and members of Congress know that even today. The Patriot Act was never to be permanent, yet the way it's been kept in perpetuity is the same way the neocons and neolibs have kept the war on terror going, i.e., through subterfuge and well-timed propaganda campaigns.
#2 - Nowhere in a president's job title is "keeping his people safe" - I assume you mean the American people, but then again I take nothing for granted and assume you might also have meant the gang that has taken over control of the government. "Swearing to protect and defend the Constitution", yes, that is in his job description.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
U.S. Charges Edward Snowden With Espionage
Friday, June 21, 2013
You're wrong, friend.
Skelling's sentence was cut as a result of "a deal struck between prosecutors and Skilling's lawyers". What it does is end SKELLING's appeals.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
U.S. Charges Edward Snowden With Espionage
"U.S. District Judge Simeon Lake reduced his term to 14 years from 24 years, accepting a deal struck between prosecutors and Skilling's lawyers"
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost Read more...
Julian Assange: "Obama 'Corrupted' The Presidency"
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Exactly one year to the day after entering London’s Ecuadorian Embassy,
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lashed out at the Obama administration
Wednesday over the White House’s ongoing pursuit of leakers.
“We’re seeing a shift from Bush to Obama,” insisted Assange. “Bush corrupted the presidency in his executive orders calling for mass seizure of telecommunications records from American companies like Verizon. To really corrupt the presidency you have to bring in an expert. You have to bring in a constitutional scholar. So Obama did it properly.”
http://rt.com/usa/assange-obama-snowden-elsberg-963/
The most intriguing fact is that the USA have laws to protect whistleblowers, these are called the false claim act (31 U.S.C §§ 3729–3733; (also known as the “Lincoln Law”, the “Informer’s Act”, or the “Qui Tam Statute”) this is a much older federal law than most people realize. Congress first passed the False Claims Act during the Civil War in 1863, in an attempt to stop dishonest contractors from selling the Union Army faulty supplies and provisions.
The state itself guarantees for the safety of the whistleblower the following is valid:
"Protecting Whistleblowers From Retaliation
Most whistleblowers in qui tam actions are reporting on fraud that has been committed by their employer or boss. If this employer suspends, demotes, threatens, or fires the person for actions related to their whistleblower lawsuit, subsection (h) of the False Claims Act allows whistleblowers to file a separate case against their employer. In retaliation lawsuits, any damages recovered are paid directly to the whistleblower. No percentage will go to the government."
So this means the USA are breaking their own laws on behalf of the fact that they are exposed to brake laws and commit crimes to humanity. 2 party justice - in this normal language this is called dictatorship without a justice system that works.
And now you know the reason why the USA cannot ask the UK to deliver Assange to them for treaty. If they would they would immediately fall under this law - and - so they use Sweden as puppet to accuse Assange for sexual crimes. And Sweden is helping them out willingly.
Bradley Manning is imprisoned because his military status. For Ed Snowden, they will probably also send out some killers - or worse- a bunch of bad ass lawyers.
Why do we never hear anyone mention the False Claims Act, even attorneys who practice in this law? More than a few of lawyers attending their Qui Tam conferences in D.C. when candidate Obama was just one of many running in the Democratic Party believe that he made it clear he understands this law (not all attorneys do) which, of course, makes his actions all the more disappointing. Alan Grayson practiced qui tam law before he became a congressman. His most famous case was Custer Battles, but he hasn't brought it up either.
The Surveillance State: What To Say To People Who Say, "I've Got Nothing To Hide"
This should be widely shared. It looks like the massive potential of NSA to blackmail political figures, judges, lawyers, CEOs and etc. to manipulate the US domestic and foreign policies, judicial system, legislatures, media, corporations, banks and so on might have already done grave damages to achieve crucial military and corporate agendas. An NSA whistleblower Russ Tice claims key government figures, including president Obama and numerous others have been under surveillance.
“I had my hand literally on the paperwork,” he told Peter B. Collins. “They went after members of Congress, the Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence and armed services committees and the judicial committee, but they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms and they went after judges. They went after State Department officials… They went after U.S. international corporations, U.S. banking firms and financial firms. They went after NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like the Red Cross and people like that, that go overseas and do humanitarian work…
“Don’t tell me there’s no abuse because I had this stuff in my hands, I looked at it, and in some cases I was literally involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. When I said to (Keith) Olbermann, my thing is high tech, the other thing is the dragnet… the terrestrial dragnet. Well, my specialty is outer space, I deal with satellites, everything that goes in and out of space, I did my spying, that’s how I found out about this.”
Question: this creates the potential for massive blackmail…
“Absolutely. I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on. I haven’t given you any names. This was in the summer of 2004. One of the papers I had in my hands was a bunch of numbers associated with a forty-something wanna-be Senator from Illinois, that’s who they went after…
“I can give you names of a bunch of different people they went after that I saw, the names and phone numbers of congress people and not only them, what looked like staff people, too, and not only their congressional offices, their home state offices. This thing is incredible what NSA’s done. They turned themselves into a rogue agency that has J. Edgar Hoover capabilities on a monstrous scale, on steroids.”
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/06/19/podcast-show-112-nsa-whistleblower-goes-on-record-reveals-new-information-names-culprits/
Blackmail by Richard Raznikov
http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2013/06/20/blackmail-16146634/
Revealed: the top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant
Fisa court submissions show broad scope of procedures governing NSA's surveillance of Americans' communication
• Document one: procedures used by NSA to target non-US persons
• Document two: procedures used by NSA to minimise data collected from US persons
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant
Drone 'Signature Strike' Witness Responds To Obama Speech: 'I Don't Trust A Single Word'
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
You're questioning my bona fides?
I'm an old well-connected liberal activist Democrat who has been fighting the DLC since it's creation. I have watched the DLC take the DemocraticParty farther to the right each election cycle, promising change and reform, blaming the lack of it on voters for not electing enough Democrats liberals progressives, all the while the party leaders are bankrolling pro-corporate DINOs over true liberals and cooperating with Republicans in Congress.
Never are the party leaders using the bully pulpit of their offices to educate or inform the American people as to the great traditions of liberal Democracy and how the People have prospered under liberal Democratic policies.
Currently, this DINO of a president has continued just about all of the Bush-Cheney policies and gone Bush-Cheney one better in several areas. Civil rights abuses that Bush and Cheney could only fantasize about, never dare try, Obama's doing.
How does any Democratic voter defend Obama after he asserts he has the right to kill any American citizen without due process or oversight? And 'preventive detention'? And Obama's claims of 'state secrets' to deny courts even look at his a$$a$sination program?
How does any Democratic voter defend Obama and DLC-Democrats making a corporate welfare program disguised as healthcare reform into the law of the land, that doesn't do what Democrats were put into power to get for the People, i.e., affordable quality medical treatment (and never will)?
You explain how you call yourself a liberal/Democrat but don't support the Democratic Party's platform.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Drone 'Signature Strike' Witness Responds To Obama Speech: 'I Don't Trust A Single Word'
Hey, dennis, I think we've all done enough 'chillin' for several lifetimes.
The next time you hear someone saying, "I've got nothing to hide" as an excuse for NSA's surveillance, or "We've got nothing to worry about, they're trustworthy", tell them to look at this:
NSA hasn't just wiretapped Obama when he was a senator, but anyone and everyone who is in a position of power, who they could conceivably blackmail. NSA Whistleblower Russell Tice - "NSA wiretapped high-ranking military officers (I know because I had the paperwork in my hands), they went after members of Congress, Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and judicial committees, they went after lawyers, lots of lawyers, law firms, judges (one of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court), they went after people in the White House, in their same administration, they went after anti-war groups, U.S. companies that do international business all around the world, they went after NGOs like the Red Cross, ............"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DmN80yi5mo
Do you remember back when BushCo was beating the drum for war against Iraq, he wanted the AUMF from Congress along with a UN seal of approval, do you recall that story about John Bolton having ordered intercepts on Colin Powell's phone calls? There was talk that Bolton was reporting back to Bush-Cheney that Powell was sabotaging their war effort with backdoor phone conversations with other nations' UN ambassadors. That's why you don't want an NSA capable of doing this to the People's representatives to Congress and the White House.
Connect NSA Wiretapping dots -- Bolton used NSA to spy on Powell - Democratic Underground
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Drone 'Signature Strike' Witness Responds To Obama Speech: 'I Don't Trust A Single Word'
Just about every problem we've had and have is the result of these agencies' endeavors on behalf of corporations and NOT the American people. Moreover, these are agencies that are politically manipulated, by both Republicans and Democrats, so that their politicians can get into (or remain) in power (see Reagan-Bush, Iran-Contra, arms for hostages, Nixon and the disruption of the Paris peace talks, etc. - http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/09/rethinking-watergateiran-contra/ ).
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Drone 'Signature Strike' Witness Responds To Obama Speech: 'I Don't Trust A Single Word'
Anyone still believing it's a "my team versus your team" (Republican versus Democrat) thing has his head up his rectvm.
D & R poIiticians are not each others' enemles, not as they have voters believing them to be. Like Coke and Pepsi are enemies until they have to put someone out of business. Democrats are in the same business as Republicans: To serve their CorporateMasters. They're all just career politicians, not wedded to a particular ideological perspective but "getting a deal and then selling, spinning it, crafting a sales pitch to constituents that it's great".
Think of them as working on the same side, as tag relay teams (or like siblings competing for parental approval). 'Good cop/bad cop'. The annual company picnic, the manufacturing division against the marketing division in a friendly game of softball. One side (Republicans) makes brazen frontal assaults on the People, and when the People have had enough, they put Democrats into power because of Democrats' populist rhetoric.
Once in power, Democrats consolidate Republicans' gains from previous years, then continue on with Republican policies but renamed, with new advertising campaigns. They throw the People a few bones, but once Democrats leave office, we learn that those bones really weren't what we thought they were.
Whenever the People get wise to the shenanigans and all the different ways they've been tricked, when the People start seeing Democrats as no different than Republicans, Democrats switch the strategy. They invent new reasons for failing to achieve the People's business.
Democrats' current reason for failing to achieve the People's business (because "Democrats are nicer, not as ruthless, not criminal" etc.) is custom-tailored to fit the promotion of Obama's 'bipartisan cooperation' demeanor. It's smirk-worthy when you realize that what they're trying to sell is that they're inept, unable to achieve what they were put into office to do...And their ineptitude, like that's somehow "a good thing".
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Drone 'Signature Strike' Witness Responds To Obama Speech: 'I Don't Trust A Single Word'
I'm an old, OLD liberal who, shockingly, can remember life in America before there was an NSA. And CIA. The sky didn't fall. Every threat and conflict we've had has been the result of the policies tied up with those agencies. From a government that serves corporate interests and not the People's interests, now a government that has been steadily privatized, corporatized (that's fascism), stealing the world's resources for the enrichment of the 1%.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Inside 'Prism' Success: Even Bigger Data Seizure
Sunday, June 16, 2013
It may be that, discussed in isolation, the government can avoid talking about what Feingold and Wyden and others have called a backdoor. Which is probably why they don’t want us to “confuse” (that is, understand the relationship between) the business records and content access.
Part of the same issue here:
“Note that even if the real target is the domestic phone number, an analyst working from the metadatabase wouldn’t have a name, just a number.”
An analyst working from the metadatabase wouldn’t necessarily have a name *provided by the telco*. If the metadatabase, or another database created from it, has numerous other columns added by NSA’s indexing and parsing algorithms, the computers can probably guess a name for a large number of the records and then tie in all kinds of other public and private files. In this case, it would probably be easy for an analyst to sift for all contacts with 2-3 degrees of a target who probably have an Muslim-sounding name or probably live in an Arab neighborhood. The FBI has also been getting phone books. So they’ve got numbers and names via other means, at least for landlines.
And getting numbers/names of cellphones isn’t all that hard, either. If they’re not classified as business records that they can just get like the metadata, they can certainly afford to buy all the commercial databases that contain this stuff. [FYI - Bush's CarlyleGroup bought out the Yellow Pages and Comcast a few years ago.]
Plus, the US ChamberOfCommerce was using this outfit to spy on journalists that were giving out information about dirty business episodes. They did a dragnet type of thing on GlennGreenwald and BradFriedman. That instance alone went beyond any reasonable personal rights and Constitutional values. Then the government tried to cover up and give some lame reason for why it was necessary for Chamber and Chamber business partners to do that to people.
The suspicion here is that that extra data — the meta-meta-data or whatever they want to call it, is so robust that they can usually do any invasive thing they want just by querying it and never looking at the cells that contain original metadata from the telcoms. The robustness is *provided* by the telcos’ metadata dumps because all the associations are generated from that database, but that’s done automatically without any pesky “voyeuristic” humans. Since the humans are only looking at the meta-meta-data, which just contains highly technical, esoteric, nothing-to-see-here information (like people’s real names, addresses, employers, travel history…), it’s as Constitutionally American as Betsy Ross eating a McDonald’s apple pie.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Inside 'Prism' Success: Even Bigger Data Seizure
I just want to point to a part of this exchange that everyone is ignoring (but that I pointed out while live tweeting this).
Mueller: I’m not certain it’s the same–I’m not certain it’s an answer to the same question.Mueller didn’t deny the NSA can get access to US person phone content without a warrant. He just suggested that Nadler might be conflating two different programs or questions.
And that’s one of the things to remember about this discussion. Among many other methods of shielding parts of the programs, the government is thus far discussing primarily the two programs identified by the Guardian: the phone metadata collection (which the WaPo reports is called MAINWAY) and the Internet content access (PRISM).
Thus, we are effectively just talking about two programs, and not two that intersect via targeted technology, as MAINWAY would with NUCLEON and MARINA with PRISM. So, while there are a slew of other possibilities for what Mueller might mean by “another question,” one big one is “how may an analyst access NUCLEON information if she had MAINWAY data”?
And, as Sanchez notes in his piece, the way 702 is supposed to work (and indeed, would have to work for the claims made about PRISM’s role in thwarting the Najibullah Zazi attack to be remotely true) is that US person information comes up along with targeted foreign targets. Indeed, as I noted last year during the FISA Amendments Act debate, in an effort to defeat this amendment prohibiting effectively what Sanchez has laid out, Sheldon Whitehouse said that getting US content without a warrant was the entire point.
He referred back to his time using warrants as a US Attorney, and said that requiring a warrant to access the US person communication would “kill this program,” and that to think warrants “fundamentally misapprehends the way in which this program operates.”The possibility that the government would do this kind of thing has been raised repeatedly since Russ Feingold did so in 2009 during the FISA Amendments Act debates, speaking specifically about the content of calls to people overseas.
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost Read more...
Inside 'Prism' Success: Even Bigger Data Seizure
The CNET “Bombshell” and the FOUR Surveillance Programs
NSA has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
In general, I’m just going to outsource my analysis of what the exchange means to Julian Sanchez.
What seems more likely is that Nadler is saying analysts sifting through metadata have the discretion to determine (on the basis of what they’re seeing in the metadata) that a particular phone number or e-mail account satisfies the conditions of one of the broad authorizations for electronic surveillance under §702 of the FISA Amendments Act.That is, what Nadler may have learned that the same analysts who have access to the phone metadata may also have authority to issue directives to companies for phone content collection. If so, it would be entirely feasible for the same analyst to learn, via the metadata database, that a suspect phone number is in contact with the US and for her to submit a request for actual content to the providers, without having to first get a FISA order covering the US person callers directly. Since she was still “targeting” the original overseas phone number, she would be able to get the US person content without a specific order.
[snip]
The analyst must believe that one end of the communication is outside the United States, and flag that account or phone line for collection. Note that even if the real target is the domestic phone number, an analyst working from the metadatabase wouldn’t have a name, just a number. That means there’s no “particular, known US person,” which ensures that the §702 ban on “reverse targeting” is, pretty much by definition, not violated.
None of that would be too surprising in principle: That’s the whole point of §702!
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost Read more...
Inside 'Prism' Success: Even Bigger Data Seizure
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Ralph Nader Blasts Minimum Wage, Obama: 'Has There Ever Been A Bigger' White House 'Con Man'?
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Nader-bashing again?
Nader didn't do anything to Gore that HarryBrowne, PatBuchanan, HowardPhillips, et al (other party candidates) didn't also do, yet you don't hear them being blamed. Gore and Bush weren't owed other party's voters, and studies have shown that Nader pulled more votes from Bush than from Gore.
You presume that Nader voters would've voted for Gore (or voted at all) when studies and exit polling have indicated that's not the case.
Had Nader not run Bush still would've won because Republicans had gamed that election more ways than we're ever going to know about. You might as well blame PatBuchanan with the same vigor and vitriole.
AlGore won. Gore got more votes in Florida. Any way it was counted (and the biggest point that people seem to forget is that there were 179,000 perfectly readable ballots that never got counted), Gore got more votes than Bush.
Whatever the means necessary to get BushCheney into the WhiteHouse would've happened. Had Nader not run, the outcome would've been the same. The powers that be weren't going to let Gore win, no matter what, and they gamed it innumerable ways.
If the means for getting BushCheney into the WhiteHouse required a close election and Nader not been running, some other means would've been used.
For pity's sake, the CIA was working on GOP absentee ballots in the weeks leading up to election day in Florida. That was the most amazing revelation from the televised court hearings in the post-election days in Florida -- 'CharlesKane' testified to altering absentee ballots in the MartinCounty's Registrar's office in the two week period prior to election day (it's against the law and should render the ballots null and void). When Kane was sworn in, he had to identify himself and give his occupation and employer. Retired CIA. The judge asked him why he was altering the absentee ballots, and he answered "I go where I'm told." Verbatim quote. The judge didn't follow up. There was next to no news coverage of this, and none by the networks.
Have you forgotten JebBush's vote purging scheme?
Have people really forgotten all the different ways that that election was gamed by the GOP? And that's just in Florida. And just the ways that we learned about because of legal proceedings in the post-election days.
There was a coup d'etat in America in 2000. A bIoodless coup, but a coup nonetheless.
And Democrats suppressed investigations, and then screwed over the CongressionalBlackCaucus's attempts to expose that stolen election.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
House Approves Derivatives Deregulation Bills That Would Open More Loopholes For Wall Street
When you say something like "You just want to take it away from the right and let the left run mad" after I've already said that ALL money needs to be eliminated from politics, you show yourself to be a dishonest agent, a dissembling prevaricator, and I no longer treat you as anyone worthy of attention.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
House Approves Derivatives Deregulation Bills That Would Open More Loopholes For Wall Street
When Roosevelt got into the White House, he did the same thing that Obama did (not enough stimulus) and when the economy began to improve, Roosevelt let the conservatives talk him into putting on the brakes. The result was just like what we're seeing now: The US slipped back into Depression in 1937. It took the MASSIVE GOVERNMENT SPENDING of WWII to get us out of it. Finally.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Edward Snowden NSA: Guardian Reveals Identity Of Whistleblower Behind NSA Revelations (VIDEO)
Renditions continue under Obama, despite due-process concerns - http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-01/world/36323571_1_obama-administration-interrogation-drone-strikes
http://www.propublica.org/article/the-best-reporting-on-detention-and-rendition-under-obama
Torture Never Stopped Under Obama - http://www.globalresearch.ca/torture-never-stopped-under-obama/17204
The Torture Memo Obama Never Rescinded
Torture is Ongoing Under Obama - http://www.myvidster.com/video/3615640/Jeremy_Scahill_Torture_Is_Ongoing_Under_Obama
Wake the he// up.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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