Joe Biden Asks Ecuador To Turn Down Edward Snowden Asylum Request

 

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&
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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.

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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
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Edward Snowden Going To Ecuador To Seek Asylum: WikiLeaks

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

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.
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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


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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.”

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