Category: The Regime

‘Trust me’

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

http://youtu.be/02ea3dBJAuI

The real problem continues to be that secret programs leave the American public out of the conversation, and many of us would gladly trade a little less security for a little less intrusion. But how would we know? In a speech today, Obama defended the latest surveillance news:

SAN JOSE, Calif. – President Obama strongly defended the government’s secret surveillance of people’s phone records and Internet activities, saying there are “a whole bunch of safeguards involved” and that Congress has repeatedly authorized the programs.

“You could complain about big brother and how this is a potential program run amok,” Obama said, “but when you actually look at the details, I think we strike the right balance.”

He thinks we trust contribution-addicted members of Congress? Really?

Commenting on the surveillance for the first time since news organizations revealed the sweeping National Security Agency programs this week, Obama highlighted limits to the programs to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens and said the surveillance has helped the government anticipate and prevent terrorist attacks.

“They make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity,” Obama said. He added that the programs are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government and they do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the e-mails of U.S. citizens and U.S. residents.”
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Washington Post: U.S. tapping into internet in real time

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Lawmakers lying about what’s going on.

The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson, in a post called “America Through The N.S.A.’s Prism”, looks at the peculiar kind of thinking that goes into justifying such broad surveillance of ordinary citizens

“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” an unnamed intelligence officer toldBarton Gellman and Laura Poitras of the Washington Post. “They” are the National Security Agency, and the Post report reveals that an N.S.A. program called PRISM has, for the past six years, been “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

”These were not occasional, extraordinary incursions: the Post, in addition to talking to the intelligence officer—who decided to speak out of a concern for civil liberties that seems to have been distinctly lacking at higher levels—obtained PowerPoint slides from an internal N.S.A. briefing and other documents. The Guardian also got the briefing materials. One of the slides explains that “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” for close to one in seven of its intelligence reports, and the program, which began in 2007, is said to be growing rapidly. The history of PRISM, Gellman and Poitras write, “shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.”

“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” an unnamed intelligence officer told Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras of the Washington Post.

This is the second story in the past twenty-four hours with deeply troubling constitutional and privacy implications—the first was the news, reported in the Guardian, of a secret court ordercompelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call records to the N.S.A. (It is increasingly clear that such orders went to companies well beyond Verizon.) We have gone through the day with Administration spokesmen and friendly senators telling us that we shouldn’t worry so much about the Verizon case because of the supposedly abstract quality of metadata. That was always a hollow defense—metadata reveals a great deal that is properly private, as Jane Mayer explains—but it is especially meaningless now, in the face of what appears to be a sprawling effort to look over the shoulders of Internet users.
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Every move you make

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

http://youtu.be/rY90E_jPiLI

I have a relative who used to work for the NSA. (He never confirmed it, but his mother did.) The last time I saw him at a family gathering, he said to me, “What are you up to in the blogging world?” I immediately retorted, “You mean you don’t already know?”

Funny joke, but this is really no laughing matter. If there’s anything the Boston marathon bombing showed us, it’s that no matter how much information they gather, they simply don’t have the ability to interpret it in real time. So why gather all this information and violate our constitutionally-protected privacy if it’s of no real use? Because they can, apparently. Via The Guardian:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government’s domestic spying powers.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.
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Bradley Manning is guilty of ‘aiding the enemy’ — if the enemy is democracy

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

Bradley Manning performed a public service, and for that, he’s being prosecuted as if he were a spy. Norman Solomon:

Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious — and revealing — is “aiding the enemy.”

A blogger at The New Yorker, Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and over the entire country:

* “Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?”

* “In that case, who is aiding the enemy — the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?”

When the deceptive operation of the warfare state can’t stand the light of day, truth-tellers are a constant hazard. And culpability must stay turned on its head.

That’s why accountability was upside-down when the U.S. Army prosecutor laid out the government’s case against Bradley Manning in an opening statement: “This is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy — material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk.”
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Civil rights

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Oh sure, why not? We weren’t using them anyway!

Police can force suspects arrested for serious crimes to give DNA samples, a divided Supreme Court ruled, 5 votes to 4, on Monday (PDF). Law enforcement officials in 28 states already routinely collect DNA from alleged criminals, but privacy advocates had argued that taking suspects’ DNA without a search warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The high court’s decision could lead to a national DNA database, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia warned in a dissent joined by three of the more liberal justices.

The case, Maryland v. King, originated from the arrest of Alonzo King, whose DNA was taken against his will after he was picked up for a gun-related assault charge. King was convicted of the gun charge, but officials also matched his DNA to evidence from an unsolved rape case. That, King argued, violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Maryland’s Supreme Court agreed. (For more background on the case, read our report from February.)

The Supreme Court’s five-justice majority struck down the Maryland court’s ruling, noting that DNA sampling is routine police procedure. “Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

Drone base for Willow Grove Air Force Base

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

http://youtu.be/p4viZczeyRI

Yeah, of course this is what passes for a jobs program from a lifelong Republican toady like Pat Meehan, who doesn’t even wipe his ass without checking with his betters. Why the hell would we (or any other town, for that matter) want this walking bad karma here? Dave Lindorff writes:

Although I have been a journalist now for 40 years, I have, by design, never sought an assignment as a war correspondent. The idea of dodging enemy bullets, avoiding mines, and of course “friendly” fire, has never appealed to me. And yet, even as President Obama is claiming to be having second thoughts about the drone slaughter he has been overseeing from the White House, I find that I am now a war correspondent in a combat zone in spite of myself.

A month ago I learned, courtesy of my congressional representative, Republican Pat Meehan, that my neighborhood, the Upper Dublin and Horsham area of Montgomery County, PA, is being made into a front-line battle zone in the Afghanistan War.

Not that Rep. Meehan put it that way. No. His announcement was that Montgomery and Bucks County were going to get 250 new jobs thanks to a decision by the Pentagon to set up a new piloting facility for killer drones at the currently mothballed Willow Grove Naval Air Station. This new drone piloting facility, like the ones in Nevada and upstate New York, will be flying drones not from the Willow Grove facility’s huge airfield, but in Afghanistan, Pakistan and wherever else America is fighting the so-called War on Terror.

With this decision, the war has literally come home. Two miles from my house, to be exact.

According to a report in the Lansdale Patch, a local weekly, the US Air Force “has chosen the Pennsylvania Air National Guard’s 111th Fighter Wing, located at the 238-acre Horsham Air Guard Station, adjacent to the shuttered Willow Grove air base to take on a new Remotely Piloted Aircraft mission.”

Effective October 1 the Air Force will have established, in already existing buildings on the currently unused base, a ground-control station for the MQ-9 Reaper. This is one of the two drones (the Predator is the other) that have been responsible for most of the drone killings during the Obama administration’s over four-year expanded use of drone warfare, and that has, according to the organization Drones Watch, been responsible for the documented deaths of over 172 children.

Col. Howard “Chip” Eissler, commander of the Pennsylvania National Guard’s 111th Fighter Wing, which had been flying A-10 Warthog ground attack jets from the base on training runs for years until the base was shut down, issued a press release saying, “This is an exciting time for our wing, and our airmen are energized to embrace this new mission.”

Two-person military teams control each Reaper from a virtual cockpit, with one serving as pilot and the other as a sensor operator. The drones, which carry deadly high-density explosive Hellfire missiles, would not be flying locally, but rather in war theaters or on missions in countries where the US is not at war, but where the Obama White House deems “enemies” to be located.

Left unsaid in the hoopla over the supposed 250 new jobs (only 75 of which would be full-time), is what it means to have combat personnel responsible for killing operating in a densely populated suburb of a major city like Philadelphia.

“I’ll get back to you on that,” a press spokesman for Rep. Meehan said, when I asked him about whether the congressman had thought about the security issues involved in locating a drone piloting operation in Horsham. He never did return the call, or a second one leaving a reminder message.

John Braxton, a leading local peace activist and founding member of US Labor Against the War (USLAW), said “We need jobs, but we need jobs for a sustainable world, not drone piloting jobs. I’m sorry to learn that our region has to play a part in illegal and immoral operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He added, “Morality aside, it certainly doesn’t make sense to put one of these operations in a populated area. If someone decided to retaliate against the drone strikes here, it could cause a lot of injuries and deaths.” Braxton also speculated that while the Pentagon is stressing that no drones will be flying locally from the base’s airfield for domestic purposes, “These things do tend to get out of hand once they get started.”

Charles Rossi, president of the Philadelphia chapter of Veterans for Peace, said, “This is really sad. One of the things that bothers me is that they’re bringing this operation into a very populated area. That’s a major mistake. It’s a terrible, terrible idea. I’m not surprised that Pat Meehan thinks it’s great, but what a lousy idea!”

I’m sure you’re as shocked as I am

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I remember when “progressives” were actually debating this during the obviously-coordinated evictions of Occupy camps across the country. “No, you can’t say that, there’s no proof!”

I thought to myself, “God, this is why people hate liberals: all this endless intellectual masturbation instead of just seeing the obvious.” But that’s just me!

The latest trove of documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) from the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service adds new detail to the spying work of federal law enforcement agencies coordinating with local law enforcement and city governments to act against Occupy encampments.

“These documents make clear that the shutdown of Occupy was not based on the supposed ‘health and safety’ concerns that law enforcement used as a public rationale, but rather that the decisions were profoundly political including a prioritization of business interests’ demands over First Amendment rights,” stated attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF.

The documents show the intense political discussion and collaboration between the Justice Department, the DHS, local law enforcement and business interests who wanted Occupy Portland, Ore., to be shut down.

The documents also show the resources devoted by Boston “anti-terrorism” authorities focusing on Occupy Boston events during the fall of 2011.

These new documents have been posted for public review on the website of the PCJF.