Drone 'Signature Strike' Witness Responds To Obama Speech: 'I Don't Trust A Single Word'

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.
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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
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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/ ).
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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".
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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%.  
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Inside 'Prism' Success: Even Bigger Data Seizure

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.  
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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 
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