Category: Civil Rights

Least Surprising News of the Day

No Comments

Obama’s war on whistle-blowers and the press has been examined by former WaPo editor-in-chief Leonard Downie, Jr., and is described in his report as, “The most aggressive since Nixon.”

The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.

The former counsel for the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case is far less circumspect about this:

Since 2009, the Obama administration has prosecuted more people as whistleblowers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all former presidents combined, a fact often rehashed in journalistic circles. In some of those cases, officials seized journalists’ phone and email records to use in their investigation. James Goodale, who was The New York Times’ chief counsel during Pentagon Papers coverage, has told CJR that Obama’s aggressive crackdown on whistleblowers is “antediluvian, conservative, backwards. Worse than Nixon. He thinks that anyone who leaks is a spy! I mean, it’s cuckoo.”

There is a pathology in the White House about leaks, and considering the vehemence, it has to come from the top, and it has to be deeply felt.

Ironically, this attitude is probably causing more harm than good for the Obama administration, though I would argue that the damage to the idea freedom of the press as a counterweight to government excess is far greater.

This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.

The NSA’s War on Privacy Continues

No Comments

It looks the NSA and its British poodles are going after the TOR network:

The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.

Top-secret NSA documents, disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the agency’s current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computers. One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets’ computers, including access to files, all keystrokes and all online activity.

But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled ‘Tor Stinks’, states: “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time.” It continues: “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” and says the agency has had “no success de-anonymizing a user in response” to a specific request.

Another top-secret presentation calls Tor “the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity”.

Tor – which stands for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project that bounces its users’ internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls “relays” or “nodes”, to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.

It is relied upon by journalists, activists and campaigners in the US and Europe as well as in China, Iran and Syria, to maintain the privacy of their communications and avoid reprisals from government. To this end, it receives around 60% of its funding from the US government, primarily the State Department and the Department of Defense – which houses the NSA.

Live in obedient fear, citizen.

“Welcome the Interest of the American People,” My Ass

No Comments

If Barack Obama “Welcomed” a discussion on NSA surveillance, he would not be fighting the tech company’s request for transparency on the spying orders:

The U.S. Justice Department has told a secret surveillance court that it opposes a request from technology companies to reveal more about the demands they receive for user information, according to court papers released on Wednesday.

Negotiations between the federal government and companies such as Google Inc have gone on for months, and while U.S. spy agencies said they plan to be more transparent, they have opposed company requests to disclose more detailed data.

The court papers were filed under seal on Monday in the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body originally created to curb intelligence abuses.

Microsoft Corp, Yahoo! Inc, LinkedIn Corp and Facebook Inc are among the companies seeking permission to publish statistics about the extent of the demands placed on them.

Don’t listen to what he says, watch what he does.

You Cannot Tell Me that This Wasn’t Done at the Request of the White House

No Comments

We now see a case where the state security apparatus declares a critic to be a “supporter of terrorism”, and so our poodles at the British intelligence services harassing a man who is protesting and documenting America’s drone strikes:

A well-known and highly respected Yemeni anti-drone activist was detained yesterday by UK officials under that country’s “anti-terrorism” law at Gatwick Airport, where he had traveled to speak at an event. Baraa Shiban, the project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve, was held for an hour and a half and repeatedly questioned about his anti-drone work and political views regarding human rights abuses in Yemen.

When he objected that his political views had no relevance to security concerns, UK law enforcement officials threatened to detain him for the full nine hours allowed by the Terrorism Act of 2000, the same statute that was abused by UK officials last month to detain my partner, David Miranda, for nine hours.

Shiban tells his story today, here, in the Guardian, and recounts how the UK official told him “he had detained me not merely because I was from Yemen, but also because of Reprieve’s work investigating and criticising the efficacy of US drone strikes in my country.”

 The notion that Shiban posed some sort of security threat was absurd on its face. As the Guardian reported Tuesday, “he visited the UK without incident earlier this summer and testified in May to a US congressional hearing on the impact of the covert drone programme in Yemen.”
Viewing anti-drone activism as indicative of a terrorism threat is noxious. As Reprieve’s Cory Crider put it yesterday, “if there were any doubt the UK was abusing its counter-terrorism powers to silence critics, this ends it.”

Greenwald further goes on to describe NSA documents, which describe opposition to drone assassinations as a military threat to operations:

One specific entry discusses “threats to unmanned aerial vehicles”. It lists various dangers to American drones, including “air defense threats”, “jamming of UAV sensor systems”, “terrestrial weather”, and “electronic warfare employed against the command and control system”.

 But alongside those more obvious, conventional threats are what the entry describes as “propaganda campaigns that target UAV use”.

 Under the title “adversary propaganda themes”, the document lists what it calls “examples of potential propaganda themes that could be employed against UAV operations”.

 One such example is entitled “Nationality of Target vs. Due Process”. It states:

Attacks against American and European persons who have become violent extremists are often criticized by propagandists, arguing that lethal action against these individuals deprives them of due process.”

In the eyes of the US government, “due process” – the idea that the US government should not deprive people of life away from a battlefield without presenting evidence of guilt – is no longer a basic staple of the American political system, but rather a malicious weapon of “propagandists”. The ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, among many other groups, have made exactly that argument against the US drone targeting program (“the US government’s killings of US citizens Anwar Al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011 violated the Constitution’s fundamental guarantee against the deprivation of life without due process of law”).

And the “loyal opposition” in the US is busy shutting down the government over insurance policies.

Hello? If you are worried about tyranny, perhaps there are some places you could look for it that are not simply batsh%$ insane.

This is Called Catch 22

No Comments

The FISA court has said that since none of the telcos have ever challenged the collections orders, and that they are the only ones with standing to challenge these orders.

I guess that it might have something to do with the fact that the only time that a phone company resisted their demands, the government retaliated against them and threw their CEO in jail.

So, no harm, no foul, I guess:

No telecommunications company has ever challenged the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court’s orders for bulk phone records under the Patriot Act, the court revealed on Tuesday.

The secretive Fisa court’s disclosure came inside a declassification of its legal reasoning justifying the National Security Agency’s ongoing bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.

Citing the “unprecedented disclosures” and the “ongoing public interest in this program”, Judge Claire V Eagan on 29 August not only approved the Obama administration’s request for the bulk collection of data from an unidentified telecommunications firm, but ordered it declassified. Eagan wrote that despite the “lower threshold” for government bulk surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act compared to other laws, the telephone companies who have received Fisa court orders for mass customer data have not challenged the law.

“To date, no holder of records who has received an Order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an Order,” Eagan wrote. “Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 Order has challenged the legality of such an order, despite the mechanism for doing so.”

That complicity has not been total. Before the Bush administration moved the bulk phone records collection under the authority of the Fisa court, around 2006, Qwest Communications refused to participate in the effort.

If you know what happened to Qwest, and you might understand why the telcos have never challenged the order.

Qwest lost numerous government contracts after refusing to collaborate in the Bush administration’s illegal data collection, and missed its numbers, which caused the stock to tank, and then they went after the CEO, Joe Nacchio. who was then prosecuted for insider trading on the basis of his rosy projections for the company.

See Nacchio’s allegations here: (from 2007)

Nacchio was convicted for selling shares of Qwest stock in early 2001, just before financial problems caused the company’s share price to tumble. He has claimed in court papers that he had been optimistic that Qwest would overcome weak sales because of the expected top-secret contract with the government. Nacchio said he was forbidden to mention the specifics during the trial because of secrecy restrictions, but the judge ruled that the issue was irrelevant to the charges against him.

Nacchio’s account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

They sent him to jail for 6 years. (He actually is coming out after a bit less than 5)

Is there any wonder that none of the telcos have challenged such an order?

Even if they don’t send you to jail, supplying secure connectivity to government agencies is a particularly lucrative part of the business, and if they took the NSA to court, it would all end, and they would lose their, “Phoney Baloney Jobs,” to quote Mel Brooks.

Harrumph, indeed.

Quote of the Day

No Comments

The upshot is that it is now known that “the N.S.A. cannot be trusted on the issue of cyber security,” said Soghoian. He continued, “My sincere hope is that the N.S.A. loses its shine. They’re the bad guy; they’re breaking into systems; they’re exploiting vulnerabilities.” It’s conceivable that they have good intentions. And yet, Soghoian continued, “they act like any other hacker. They steal data. They read private communications.” With that methodology, how easy can it be, though, to give the agency the benefit of the doubt? As many have, Thomas Drake compared the worldview of what he calls the “rogue agency” to the total surveillance of George Orwell’s “1984,” in which the only way to escape was “to cower in a corner. I don’t want to live like that. I’ve already lived that and it’s not pleasant.”

—Matt Buchanan in The New Yorker

(Emphasis mine)

How Ordinary People Can Do Heroic things………

No Comments

Susan De Guardiolia has confronted the bureaucratic agents of tyranny, and she won:

Fundamentally, the routine expansion of what can only be described as a creeping police state can be stopped by citizens who know their rights.

You do not have to be a lawyer to do this.

You simply have to know a few things:

  • Am I being detained?
    • If the answer is no, leave.  If they refuse to answer, repeat the question, politely.
  • If a policeman asks to search your belongings (including vehicle), then they need your consent to search.  Clearly state your refusal to consent.

Police officers will frequently make voluntary compliance appear mandatory. 

Know your rights.

Pass the Popcorn………

No Comments

Pass the Popcorn

The NRA has joined with the ACLU’s lawsuit against NSA surveillance of Americans. They are maintaining that it violates the law against maintaining a national gun registry:

The National Rifle Association has joined a lawsuit against the federal government’s sweeping surveillance program, claiming the collection of phone records and other data violates First Amendment rights and amounts to an illegal gun registry.

In supporting the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit, the NRA on Wednesday filed a supporting brief arguing the National Security Agency’s datamining “could allow identification of NRA members, supporters, potential members, and other persons with whom the NRA communicates, potentially chilling their willingness to communicate with the NRA.”

The NSA’s phone database would let the government track whether gun owners called the NRA, gun stores, shooting ranges or others.
The brief also says the database “could allow the government to circumvent legal protections for Americans’ privacy, such as laws that guard against the registration of guns or gun owners,” thereby creating an illegal “national gun registry.”

The ACLU welcomed the gun group’s support.

As strange as it sounds, I welcome the NRA’s support as well.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

No Comments

The owner of Lavabit, the now-shuttered secure email provider, has been told that he could be jailed for terminating his service:

The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.

“I could be arrested for this action,” Ladar Levison told NBC News about his decision to shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, in protest over a secret court order he had received from a federal court that is overseeing the investigation into Snowden.

Lavabit said he was barred by federal law from elaborating on the order or any of his communications with federal prosecutors. But a source familiar with the matter told NBC News that James Trump, a senior litigation counsel in the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., sent an email to Levison’s lawyer last Thursday – the day Lavabit was shuttered — stating that Levison may have “violated the court order,” a statement that was interpreted as a possible threat to charge Levison with contempt of court.

This can be interpreted in two ways: Either they are threatening to jail him for fighting a broad subpoena in court, or they are threatening him because he shut down the service because he refused to run it as part of an ongoing and broad surveillance of his customers.

In either case, this is contemptible, even if it is nominally legal.

Obama Claims that the Reports of NSA Spying on US Citizens Show that the System Works

No Comments

Inadvertent, My Ass

The fact that Barack Obama is being sent out to tell blatant lies by the state security apparatus like some sort of poodle does not fill me with confidence.

No I’m serious. He is saying that because the system sorked”, because a strongly worded report was issued:

President Barack Obama said in an interview that aired Friday that recent revelations the National Security Agency had collected Americans’ emails prove that oversight for such surveillance programs is working properly.

 Obama told CNN’s “New Day” the data collection was “inadvertent” and attributed it to “technical problems,” which were then presented to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

 “The court said, ‘This isn’t going to cut it. You’re going to have to improve the safeguards, given these technical problems.’ That’s exactly what happened,” he said. “So the point is, is that all these safeguards, checks, audits, oversight worked.”

He claims that the errors were unintentional.  He is lying through his teethe:

Some National Security Agency analysts deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans multiple times in the past decade, contradicting Obama administration officials’ and lawmakers’ statements that no willful violations occurred.

 “Over the past decade, very rare instances of willful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found,” the NSA said in a statement to Bloomberg News. “NSA takes very seriously allegations of misconduct, and cooperates fully with any investigations – responding as appropriate. NSA has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency’s authorities.”

 The incidents, chronicled in a new report by the NSA’s inspector general, provide more evidence that U.S. agencies sometimes have violated legal and administrative restrictions on domestic spying, and may add to the pressure to bolster laws that govern intelligence activities.

 The inspector general documented an average of one case per year over 10 years of intentionally inappropriate actions by people with access to the NSA’s vast electronic surveillance systems, according to an official familiar with the findings. The incidents were minor, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified intelligence.

BTW, one a year is a lie from the inspector general is a gross understatement, because we know that for years, NSA agents listened to and recorded for later amusement phone sex between overseas soldiers and their loved ones:

There have been allegations of abuse. Back in 2008 it was widely reported that NSA employees were listening to phone sex calls between American soldiers and their partners. NSA employees would save these calls and share them around for their own personal amusement. This is a textbook example of abuse. This is the kind of invasion of privacy that deeply concerns most Americans.

 The most likely reasons we haven’t heard about more abuses is because the NSA is incredibly secretive, basically never audited, and the Obama administration has engaged in such an aggressive war on whistleblowers people are scared to come forward.

I would also note that one of the controls that Obama taunts is the FISA court, and they say that the NSA program was unconstitutional and also that the NSA lied to them:

In a strongly worded opinion, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court expressed consternation at what he saw as a pattern of misleading statements by the government and hinted that the NSA possibly violated a criminal law against spying on Americans.

 “For the first time, the government has now advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe,” John D. Bates, then the surveillance court’s chief judge, wrote in his Oct. 3, 2011, opinion.

This really is a profile in cowardice.

Update:
I did not realize that the video clip was auto-playing. I have corrected this. Sorry.

I Think that People are Finally Sick and Tired of Michael Bloomberg’s “Making the Trains Run on Time” Act

No Comments

The New York City Council just overrode Bloomberg’s veto of police reforms:

The City Council voted Thursday to greatly increase oversight of the New York Police Department and of its widespread use of stop-and-frisk tactics.

Coming after historic crime declines stretching 20 years and aimed at a police force whose tactics long enjoyed strong support in City Hall and among many New Yorkers, the move on two bills marked a decisive swing of the pendulum toward reining in the practices of officers and the policies of their leaders.

The votes, a week and a half after a federal judge ruled aspects of police stops in the city unconstitutional, amounted to a stinging personal defeat for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He has considered the policy to be central to one of his main achievements: a city safer than many hardened residents had thought possible.

The two bills, which the mayor had vetoed and will now become law, represented an effort by frustrated elected officials to force changes on the police from the outside — one through an outside inspector general with subpoena power to study and make policy recommendations to the department; and the other by opening state courts up to individual claims of bias-based policing and by expanding the categories of people entitled to sue.

Mr. Bloomberg immediately denounced the new laws as an effort to “outsource management of the N.Y.P.D. to unaccountable officials,” and he vowed to sue to stop the bill on expanding profiling claims. “It is a dangerous piece of legislation,” he said, “and we will ask the courts to step in before innocent people are harmed.”

For the mayor, who argued strenuously and repeatedly in public to head off the passage of the bills, the votes offered a stark reminder of his diminished ability to influence city politics in the waning months of his administration.

The 51-member Council, led by its speaker, Christine C. Quinn, enacted the two measures by voting to override Mr. Bloomberg’s earlier veto of both bills.

The Council voted overwhelmingly to create an independent inspector general for the department, with 39 in favor and 10 opposed. The second bill, which would expand the ability of New Yorkers to sue the police over bias-based profiling, passed with exactly the 34 votes necessary for an override. Ms. Quinn, who is running for mayor, voted against it. (Two members were absent from the vote.)

There are a lot of people who are just plain sick and tired of Michael Bloomberg.

35 Years

No Comments

This was the sentence rendered by the judge against Bradley Manning.

This is actually a mild sentence, as he is eligable for parole in about 8-1/2 years. (The military has parole, unlike civilian Federal sentences)

While the defense asked for 25 years, this is still a relatively mild sentence, particularly considering the prosecution’s request of 60 years.

Still, the fact that the ringleader of the Abu Ghraib torturers only got 6 years indicates a problem with our priorities.  The damage done to both the military, and the country, was far greater.

IMNSHO, Obama will never pardon manning.

Quote of the Day

No Comments

When a government detains someone who is very clearly not a terrorist for nine hours without access to an attorney under a terrorism statute, that government has proven every point Greenwald wanted to make. The argument is over right there.

 And every “progressive” with a beef against Greenwald who attempts to defend the UK’s actions does nothing more than prove Greenwald’s point. Governments that detain civil libertarian bloggers and journalists as terrorists deserve every heaping of scorn they get, as do those who defend them.

—David Atkins

I Really Don’t Think that I Have Ever Seen Rachel Maddow this Pissed Off

No Comments

Look at this video.

Rachel Maddow is pissed off, and she is pissed off at Barack Obama.

Here are the high points, but you should watch the whole 8:02:

Journalism is not terrorism. Journalism can be enraging to people in power; journalism can sometimes even be frightening to people in power, but journalism is not terrorism. Reporting on what governments do, even when those governments prefer to keep those actions secret, is not terrorism. Terrorism is a real and discrete thing in the world. It is not an all-encompassing term you apply to everything the government doesn’t want you to do.

The White House today said it had been given a heads-up in advance that the detention of David Miranda was likely to happen…. The White House went out of their way today to say that it was Britain’s decision to detain Glenn Greenwald’s partner — it was not something the US asked Britain to do; and okay fine, but the White House did know about it in advance and it still happened.

We have that kind of special relationship with Britain where if our government were outraged that this detention was going to happen, we could have objected, right? We could have at least asked our dear friends, the British government, to not do this, maybe in the interests of not intimidating the activities of the free press, if not for any other reason. Did our government make any objections when it got advance notice from Britain that this detention was going to happen? Did our government protest? And if not, why not? I tend to think we did not protest, since it went ahead.

I know the US government is not happy about Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald and their reporting about US surveillance. The president said that the disclosures from their source have led to a disorderly debate about these issues and even though we ought to have a debate about these issues, it ought to be more orderly. Fine. But if the United States wants to convince the world that the Glenn Greenwalds and Laura Poitras’ of the world are correct when they say the US government is going too far — if they want to underline and put flashing red lights on that reporting that says that counter-terrorism is being used to justify all sorts of things that are not justified by the actual threat of terrorism, and that in fact have just greenlit gross government overreach and intrusion and intimidation of legitimate activity including journalism — then putting journalists and their families through marathon interrogations and seizing all their electronics is a really great way to start convincing the world that all that reporting is accurate.

Letting our closest allies do it while we stand silent is the same thing as us doing it. Journalism is not terrorism. Pretending otherwise is outrageous, and ridiculous, and a dangerous affront to who we are as a country and a democracy. It’s an absolute outrage.

My opinion is even stronger. I believe that the British called for permission, and they got it.

That being said, Obama has lost Maddow, at least on this specific instance, and this is significant.

H/t Dallasdoc at Daily Kos.,who dutifully transcribed the above quote.

Drip, Drip, Drip………

No Comments

So we have two more NSA revelations today.

First, the Washington Post uncovered an internal audit for the NSA which shows that it violated privacy regulations pretty routinely.

Additionally, the FISA court has admitted that it has no ability to verify that its orders are being followed.

It seems that every few days, another shoe drops, and each time, it reveal that both the state security apparatus and the Obama administration have been lying through their teeth.

Michael Bloomberg Gets a Well Deserved Smackdown on Stop and Frisk

No Comments

Ta-Nehisi Coates nails it when he calls the judge’s ruling, “Ending Michael Bloomberg’s Racist Profiling Campaign:

As I’ve noted before, Ray Kelly and Michael Bloomberg justify the number of stops by arguing that black and Latino men commit the majority of violent crime. This position intentionally ignores the data which shows, even after controlling for crime rates, the NYPD still discriminates. It’s very important that people interested in this case understand that. And as always, anyone who is interested in the case really needs to listen to This American Life‘s reporting on Officer Adrian Schoolcraft.

He’s actually easier on the bigot Bobsey twins Kelly and Bloomberg than I have been.

I have described this as Bull Connor bullsh%$ and described it as an attempt to terrorize minorities.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever………

No Comments

Look at the White House transcripts of the most recent press conference:

Q: Can you understand, though, why some people might not trust what you’re saying right now about wanting to —

 THE PRESIDENT: No, I can’t.

This is wrong on so many levels:

  • The constitution was explicitly created to make sure that we did not have to trust the authorities.  It was intended to create contention, and quite honestly distrust, to make sure that powers are limited.
  • He does not understand how people might be concerned that he might not be completely forthcoming.

I am not sure what is more alarming, his complete lack of understanding of the critical in the Constitution concept of the separation of powers, or the pervasive narcissism.

I would be hard pressed to find a better illustration of why the founding fathers were concerned about the possibility of excesses by the executive.

Lying Liar

No Comments

Obama went on Leno a few days ago, and insisted that, “There Is No Spying On Americans:

President Obama defended the , telling NBC’s Jay Leno on Tuesday that: “There is no spying on Americans.”

 “We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. … That information is useful.”

 Obama also called the National Security Agency’s surveillance a “critical component to counterterrorism,” and defended the shutdown of U.S. embassies and travel warnings this weekend, saying they followed information about a possible terrorist threat “significant enough that we’re taking every precaution.”

He’s lying, as James Ball and Spencer Ackerman showed in today’s Guardian, where it was revealed that the NSA is using a legal loophole to warrantlessly search Americans emails and text messages:

The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

 The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing “warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans”.

 The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs.

 The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection.

 The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant, and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as “incidental collection” in surveillance parlance.

 But this is the first evidence that the NSA has permission to search those databases for specific US individuals’ communications.

Only, as I noted a few days ago, the DEA is using NSA intercepts against people in the United States and lying about it.

You may be thinking that it is still not a problem, because you don’t do drugs, but you probably use money, and guess what, the IRS is using NSA intercepts too:

Following up on exclusive reporting from earlier this week about how the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency uses NSA surveillance data and tips from a secretive unit called the Special Operations Divisions (SOD) to initiate investigations, Reuters on Thursday reveals that the Internal Revenue Service was aware of and may have also used these “unconstitutional” tactics.

 What’s troubling in both cases, according to legal experts, is the manner in which the agencies hide the true source of an investigation’s starting point—never revealing the use of the highly classified sources involved—and then “recreate” a parallel investigation to justify criminal findings.

 Additionally troubling is that the IRS and the DEA are only two of the more than twenty federal agencies that work in tandem with the SOD, leading to speculation that the practice of utilizing than hiding surveillance techniques that have not been properly documented or approved could be far-reaching.

So, the f%$#ing IRS is f%$#ing collaborating with the f%$#ing NSA to invade your privacy, and find out if there is something, anything that they can use against them.

And by the way, the successes that they are touting as a result of our government going “Big Brother” on all of us?  The best that they have come up with is the trial and conviction of a cab driver who did nothing but send money to al-Shabab in Somalia:

He was a San Diego cab driver who fled Somalia as a teenager, winning asylum in the United States after he was wounded during fighting among warring tribes. Today, Basaaly Moalin, 36, is awaiting sentencing following his conviction on charges that he sent $8,500 to Somalia in support of the terrorist group al-Shabab.

Moalin’s prosecution, barely noticed when the case was in court, has suddenly come to the fore of a national debate about U.S. surveillance. Under pressure from Congress, senior intelligence officials have offered it as their primary example of the unique value of a National Security Agency program that collects tens of millions of phone records from Americans.

For getting this cabbie, we are spending $2-4 billion just on a data center in Utah.  (The NSA budget is estimated to be worth more than $ 10 billion)

Big brother don’t come cheap, apparently.

I don’t care about Obama’s most recent offer to create the illusion of transparency.

It is clear that the problem with surveillance dragnets that it will be abused by bad people, and bad people, whether he understands it or not is Barack Obama in his war on whistleblowers.