Category: Civil Rights

Thoughts on Ferguson: Part 2: the Protests and the Police Response

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These are not peace officers, These are an implacably hostile occupying force.

This guy is eager to start shooting “animals”

First, and perhaps most telling, was the police officer caught on tape screamig, “Bring it, all you f%$#ing animals! Bring it!”

This is not just a cop who is ill trained to either handl a protest and defuse potential violence, this is someone who actively wants to shoot some people. (One does wonder which Cracker Jack box this guy got his badge out of)

Then, we have the comments by the Ferguson police chief, blaming the violence on “outside agitators,” which has historical echos to the comments of people like Birmingham’s infamous police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor.

I think that it is fairly clear that both the Ferguson, and the St. Louis County PD have not covered themselves with glory, but a bigger issue is the increasing militarization of the police, and their increasing view of the general public as the enemy:

Michael Brown was shot dead by an officer from a police force of 53, serving a population of just 21,000. But the police response to a series of protests over his death has been something more akin to the deployment of an army in a miniature warzone.

 Ferguson police have deployed stun grenades, rubber bullets and what appear to be 40mm wooden baton rounds to quell the protests in a show of force that is a stark illustration of the militarization of police forces in the US.

 “I’m a soldier, I’m a military officer and I know when there’s a need for such thing, but I don’t think in a small town of 22,000 people you need up-armor vehicles,” Cristian Balan, a communications officer in the US army, who was not speaking on behalf of the US military, told the Guardian. “Even if there’s an active shooter – are you really going to use an up-armor vehicle? Do you really need it?”

Of course the don’t but the Pentagon is giving away their slightly older stuff for free, and they are fun toys.

The problem is that it makes things worse, not better:

“As we’ve seen in Ferguson, the militarization of policing tends to escalate the risk of violence to the communities,”said Kara Dansky, senior counsel with the ACLU’s Center for Justice and the prime author of its June 2014 report on the militarization of US police. “We think that historically, the police and the military have had different roles and that American neighborhoods aren’t war zones and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies.”

 She said the trend of militarizing local police forces has continued over the past several decades and that communities of color bare the brunt of most military policing.

 Representative Hank Johnson, a house Democrat from Georgia, said on Thursday that he plans to introduce the “Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act”, which would end the department of defense’s military surplus program.

Your mouth to God’s ear, Representative Johnson.

I would also suggest that requiring on duty police to wear cameras at all time would help.  We know what happens when both the police, and the citizenry, become aware that there is monitoring of law enforcement interactions with the general populace:

.
In 2012, Rialto, a small city in California’s San Bernardino County, outfitted its police officers with small Body Cams to be worn at all times and record all working hours. The $900 cameras weighed 108 grams and were small enough to fit on each officer’s collar or sunglasses. They recorded full-color video for up to 12 hours, which was automatically uploaded at the end of each shift, where it could be held and analyzed in a central database.

 When researchers studied the effect of cameras on police behavior, the conclusions were striking. Within a year, the number of complaints filed against police officers in Rialto fell by 88 percent and “use of force” fell by 59 percent. “When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better,” Chief William A. Farrar, the Rialto police chief, told the New York Times. “And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better.”

The situation in Ferguson has gotten so bad that both liberal icon Elizabeth Warren, and Teabagger militant Justin Amash have condemned the overreaction of the police, and civil rights icon John Lewis has called for Barack Obama to federalize the National Guard and declaring martial law.

On the bright side, the local constabulary, both the Ferguson and the St. Louis county PD have been removed from command, and replaced by the state Highway Patrol, which has resulted in a lighter touch and less violence:

A wall of militarised police had blocked the centre of Ferguson, Missouri, this week, shooting teargas and rubber bullets at seething protesters who dared to show any defiance.

 On Thursday evening it melted away.

 A carnival-like demonstration filled the centre of the city after a new police chief given control of protests over the killing of an unarmed 18-year-old implemented a dramatic shift in tactics.

 Hundreds of people gathered at the same intersection in this northern suburb of St Louis that has been the epicentre of violent clashes with police in the previous days.

 But where the officers with assault rifles once stood, backed by armoured trucks topped with snipers’ nests, on Thursday there was almost no police presence.

 Car horns filled the air as people blew whistles and chanted “no justice, no peace” and “hands up, don’t shoot”, the slogan adopted in solidarity with Michael Brown, who according to witnesses was shot by a police officer as he fled a confrontation with his arms aloft on Saturday afternoon.

 The shift followed the installation of Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri state highway patrol as the effective commander on the ground, under orders earlier in the day from the state governor, Jay Nixon. His force replaced the St Louis county police in leading the operation

Gee, a simple rule, “Don’t be a savage and blindly unreasoning racist asshole,” appears to have defused much of the situation.

I think that the police forces in that part of Missouri rate a full deep dive investigation of their policies and actions by the Feds.

Zero tolerance, baby.

Why Snowden Going Through Channels was Never a Real Options

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NPR looks at what happened to other people who attempted to complain about agency misconduct, and it ain’t pretty:  Harassment, bogus charges, and systematic vilification, specifically the cases of Bill Binney and Thomas Drake.

I think that the quote describes just how effective the inspectors general are about such things:

“Perhaps it’s the case that we could’ve shown, we could’ve explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” [NSA Inspector General George] Ellard said.

 We he is refer”Perhaps it’s the case that we could’ve shown, we could’ve explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” Ellard said.

If you listen to the interview, you realize that he’s not talking the Inspector General’s office, he’s talking about the NSA.

The IG, and the whole whistle blowing apparatus are completely captured, and have not the slightest interest in addressing any potential issues.

His goal is talking Edward Snowden and other potential whistle-blowers out of actually blowing the whistle.

Also, it as it is noted in in the report, the new “protections” for intelligence operatives does not apply to contractors, and almost all new hires of the intelligence agencies are contractors.

How convenient.

In Which a Pundit Gets it Completely F%$#ing Wrong

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Over at The Atlantic they are wringing their hands because gay rights groups are now balking at religious exemptions embedded in gay rights legislation because of the Hobby Lobby decision:

In the Hobby Lobby decision handed down last month, the Supreme Court was asked to strike a balance between women’s rights and religious freedom. But the major conflict that has erupted in the wake of that decision has been between religious freedom and gay rights. The resulting controversy has split gay-rights and faith groups on the left, with wide-ranging political fallout that some now fear could hurt both causes.

One chapter of the controversy is set to close on Monday, when President Obama plans to sign a long-awaited executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against gays and lesbians, according to a White House official. But the debate that began over that order’s provisions for religious nonprofits has spilled over into a broader conflict. Many prominent gay-rights groups have now withdrawn their support from a top legislative priority, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, over the religious exemption it contains.

It’s not a bad thing, this response is essential to good governance.

As I have noted before, “My dear, religion is like a penis. It’s a perfectly fine thing for one to have and take pride in, but when one takes it out and waves it in my face we have a problem.” 

Civil rights should not be conditioned to kowtowing to those who use religion for self-aggrandizement or as an excuse to show hostility.

Religion is a private matter, and not a matter of public morality, nor should it ever be.

On a more pragmatic level, these religious carve outs create an impetus for more carve outs, so now we have a nurse suing a birth control clinic because they would not hire her because she would refuse to prescribe to birth control.

This is insanity, and it needs to stop.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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You know all those terrorism plots that the FBI uncovered?

A study has revealed that the FBI manufactured most of the terror plots that it broke up:

Nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the United States since 9/11 featured the “direct involvement” of government agents or informants, a new report says.

Some of the controversial “sting” operations “were proposed or led by informants”, bordering on entrapment by law enforcement. Yet the courtroom obstacles to proving entrapment are significant, one of the reasons the stings persist.

The lengthy report, released on Monday by Human Rights Watch, raises questions about the US criminal justice system’s ability to respect civil rights and due process in post-9/11 terrorism cases. It portrays a system that features not just the sting operations but secret evidence, anonymous juries, extensive pretrial detentions and convictions significantly removed from actual plots.

“In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act,” the report alleges.

Which ones weren’t? Those ones:

The four high-profile domestic plots it found free of government involvement were the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; Najibullah Zazi’s 2009 plot to bomb the New York subway; the attempted Times Square carbombing of 2010; and the 2002 shooting at Los Angeles International Airport’s El Al counter.

So, while the FBI has been finding random idiots (read the case files, they are really stupid, while missing all of of the plots that actually went through to fruition.

But they did catch one potential terrorist that they did not sponsor ……… They just missed the other ¾ of them.

It’s an adequate batting average, for a pitcher, I guess.

You know, maybe the FBI should stop manufacturing terrorist plots, and start looking at real terror plots.

And while they are at it, how about going after the f%$#ing banksters?  They are still defrauding the rest of us.

And while we are at it, how about a pony.

I’m not gonna get that either.

For Once, Obama Declines to Split the Baby (Fabulous!)

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After the failure of Congress to pass any LGBT civil rights legislation, Obama has signed an executive order banning it for government contractors.

The surprising bit is that despite entreaties from the religion-as-an-excuse-to-be-a-bigot crowd, the executive order does not grant a religious exemption:

President Obama, resisting calls from several prominent faith leaders, will not include a new exemption for religiously affiliated government contractors when he issues an executive order Monday barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the White House said Friday.

Obama announced last month that he would sign such an order after concluding that Congress was not going to act on a broader measure prohibiting discrimination based on sexual discrimination or gender identity by companies.

Since then, faith leaders have urged him to include an exemption for government contractors with a religious affiliation, such as some social service agencies.

White House officials said Friday that the new executive order would not include such an exception. But Obama will preserve an exemption put in place by former president George W. Bush that allows religiously affiliated contractors to favor employees of a certain religion in making hiring decisions.

Gay rights organizations have criticized that earlier exemption, and they celebrated news Friday that Obama would not be broadening it.

“With the strokes of a pen, the president will have a very real and immediate impact on the lives of millions of LGBT people across the country,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group.

I think that one of the consequences of the Hobby Lobby decision is the understanding that accommodation of the Talibaptist crowd is a losing proposition.

I’ve thought this for a while.

People who use religion as a, “Veil under which anger can be legitimatized,” to are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.

Best Soccer Hooliganism Ever!!!1!!! – Stellar Parthenon

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It was at the World Cup, when the US team played the German team:

As Germany basks in its World Cup victory, it’s easy to forget that one of the most telling geopolitical moments of the tournament came during the Germany-U.S. game. As American fans chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”, the Germans countered with, “N-S-A! N-S-A! N-S-A!”

The author tries to make the bigger point about America’s role in the world, that our allies are increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of the indispensable America.

While I agree that this is true, particularly with regard to the next generation coming online, this is not my takeaway on this story.

My takeaway is that Germans must be the cleverest soccer rowdies in the world, though I will acknowledge that, “cleverest soccer rowdy,” is a lot like, “world’s hairiest naked mole rat.”

I’m Guessing that Obama Has a Sad Right Now

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Because the UN Human Rights Commissioner has said that Edward Snowden should not be prosecuted:

The United Nations’s top human rights official has suggested that the United States should abandon its efforts to prosecute Edward Snowden, saying his revelations of massive state surveillance had been in the public interest.

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, credited Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor, with starting a global debate that has led to calls for the curtailing of state powers to snoop on citizens online and store their data.

“Those who disclose human rights violations should be protected: we need them,” Pillay told a news conference.

“I see some of it here in the case of Snowden, because his revelations go to the core of what we are saying about the need for transparency, the need for consultation,” she said. “We owe a great deal to him for revealing this kind of information.”

The United States has filed espionage charges against Snowden, charging him with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorised person.

Pillay declined to say whether President Barack Obama should pardon Snowden, saying he had not yet been convicted. “As a former judge I know that if he is facing judicial proceedings we should wait for that outcome,” she said. But she added that Snowden should be seen as a human rights defender.

Considering the fact that Obama’s war on whistle-blowers makes Richard Nixon look like Julian Assange, I rather imagine that Obama is on the phone telling UN Ambassador Samantha Powers to go postal on Ms. Pillay.

Glenn Greenwald Reveals that NSA Spied on Americans for the Crime of Being Muslim

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Greenwald, and Murtaza Hussain, reveal that the NSA spied on hundreds of Americans with no justification:

The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans—including a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics, and lawyers—under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the list of Americans monitored by their own government includes:

• Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;

• Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;

• Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;

• Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;

• Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

The individuals appear on an NSA spreadsheet in the Snowden archives called “FISA recap”—short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the Justice Department must convince a judge with the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause to believe that American targets are not only agents of an international terrorist organization or other foreign power, but also “are or may be” engaged in or abetting espionage, sabotage, or terrorism. The authorizations must be renewed by the court, usually every 90 days for U.S. citizens.

………

The five Americans whose email accounts were monitored by the NSA and FBI have all led highly public, outwardly exemplary lives. All five vehemently deny any involvement in terrorism or espionage, and none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press. Some have even climbed the ranks of the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishments.

………

In one 2005 document, intelligence community personnel are instructed how to properly format internal memos to justify FISA surveillance. In the place where the target’s real name would go, the memo offers a fake name as a placeholder: “Mohammed Raghead.”



The vast majority of individuals on the “FISA recap” spreadsheet are not named. Instead, only their email addresses are listed, making it impossible in most cases to ascertain their identities. Under the heading “Nationality,” the list designates 202 email addresses as belonging to “U.S. persons,” 1,782 as belonging to “non-U.S. persons,” and 5,501 as “unknown” or simply blank. The Intercept identified the five Americans placed under surveillance from their email addresses.

Here is the kicker:

Last week, anonymous officials told another news outlet that the government did not have a FISA warrant against at least one of the individuals named here during the timeframe covered by the spreadsheet.

(emphasis mine)

For the past year, every time someone speculates about what the US state security apparatus does, we get a ferocious denial from the various three later acronyms (TLA).

And then, a few weeks later, some more Snowden docs get released, and we discover that they are lying through their teeth to us.

Both the White House and the Congress have completely failed in their duties to direct and oversee our surveillance industrial complex.

“Right to be Forgotten,” My Ass

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Robert Peston, Economics Editor at the BBC, was notified by Google that it was removing one of his blog posts from its European search index in accordance with the European Court of Justice’s recent ruling giving people “The Tight to be Forgotten”:

This morning the BBC received the following notification from Google:
Notice of removal from Google Search: we regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/ robertpeston/2007/10/merrills_mess.html

What it means is that a blog I wrote in 2007 will no longer be findable when searching on Google in Europe.

Which means that to all intents and purposes the article has been removed from the public record, given that Google is the route to information and stories for most people.

So why has Google killed this example of my journalism?

Well it has responded to someone exercising his or her new “right to be forgotten”, following a ruling in May by the European Court of Justice that Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it.

(emphasis original)

The only person mentioned in this article was the disgraced former head of Merrill Lynch, Stan O’Neill, but the Ex-Merrill CEO has denied any knowledge of this request, though this is a kind of non-denial denial, where he might have hired a law form, or someone like Reputation.com to monitor his online presence, and they sent the request at his request.

You will notice that O’Neill did not deny that he had taken action to improve his reputation on the web, only that he lacked specific knowledge of this request.

In an update, Mr. Peston suggests that the request might have come from someone who commented on his post, since a search for Mr. O’Neill still pulls up the post, but I did a search of Google.co.uk for all of the commenter’s who left a proper name, and they all came up as well.

The Guardian revealed that they had been notified that 3 sets of articles, about a lying soccer ref, French Post-It® art, and a lawyer on trial for fraud.

This is, of course, a complete clusterf%$#, as was predicted when this ruling came down.

I Disagree With the Rude One

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In response to the Supreme Court decision giving free reign for antiabortion protesters to intimidate doctors, nurses, and patients, the Rude Pundit suggests that we engage in aggressive in your face threatening protests outside the churches that winds up the anti-abortion terrorists:

Look at that church. Isn’t it a pretty little church? It’s St. Mary’s Church in Grafton, Massachusetts. It’s freakin’ idyllic, no? It’s also deeply invested in anti-abortion actions. The congregation participated in 40 Days for Life, an action during Lent that 17,000 churches around the world took part in, with another 40 Days planned for September 24 to November 2.

The St. Mary’s churchgoers headed over to Worcester to protest at a Planned Parenthood and to “sidewalk counsel” women there. “[I]s it worth it to stand out in the wind and rain and cold to pray in front of Planned Parenthood?” the church’s website asks. And, for them, it was. They convinced one woman to not get an abortion. You can see the baby. It’s like a taste of something that will keep them addicted to protesting. A crack baby, if you will. No doubt the church will be supporting the baby and the mother until the baby is an adult. No doubt.

Come September, and maybe even before, the parishioners will be harassing every woman who goes to the Planned Parenthood, even those just going for pap smears and help getting pregnant. And they will no doubt be joined by the anti-abortion radicals, the fetus picture carriers, the screamers, the hysterics who shame women.

“Is it really necessary to be out on the sidewalk instead of praying at home?” St. Mary’s wants to know. Look up at that picture again. What do you see in front of St. Mary’s? That’s a nice, wide, very public sidewalk. The parking lot is across the street, so most of the people attending church services on, say, a nice summer Sunday will have to walk that sidewalk, a sidewalk just like the one outside Planned Parenthood in Worcester. A sidewalk like the one that Eleanor McCullen “gently” counsels women from outside a Planned Parenthood in Boston.

 ………

 So let’s get out there, every goddamn Sunday, and head to the churches that send their lunatic Jesus-fellaters out to try to shut down Planned Parenthoods, and stand on their sidewalks, just like the one up there outside St. Mary’s in Grafton, and let’s make churchgoing a living f%$#in’ hell for ’em. Let’s bodily block the access to the walkways that lead to the church. Let’s bring signs that have pictures of women who were killed by illegal abortions. Let’s go up to them and try to convince them to convert or go atheist, following them until we are on church property and have to stop. Let’s block the street by walking back and forth in the crosswalk. Let’s force the churchgoers to need escorts to even get inside.

 Shit, let’s plaster the telephone poles with photos of the priests and church leaders, their addresses, their phone numbers. Let’s tell them as they pass, “We know where you live.” Let’s film everyone going into the church and post those on a website. Hey, it’s a public f%$#in’ sidewalk, man. Let’s scream at them about how they’re terrible people, how they support raping children, how they have given money to help silence victims. Can’t you hear their silent screams? Can’t you? F%$#, yeah.

 Going to church is a choice, no? Let’s make sure they regret that f%$#in’ choice, however legal it may be for them to make it. Then let’s see how quickly they’re begging for buffer zones.

(%$# mine)

First, and most important, is that this behavior is wrong.

Second, the methods that the Rude Pundit is suggesting require that its target already have a credible fear that they will be the target of violent terrorism.  The folks outside the Church will not be slashing tires, setting fire to the church, or shooting priests,* so any such demonstration will be almost completely without impact.

I would suggest, however, that people of good conscience refuse do make other common causes with people who go to places like St. Mary’s Church in Grafton, because consorting with terrorists, even at a soup kitchen, is still consorting with terrorists.

*Though some former alter boys might be considering this for a completely different reason.

Wisconsin Attorney General Threatens People Who Obey Court Ruling

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I just love how right wing Talibaptist types think that the law does not apply to them:

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said Thursday that same-sex couples who have wed in recent days are not married in the eyes of the law and that county clerks issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples could be prosecuted.

Also Thursday, Republican Gov. Scott Walker backed Van Hollen’s work defending the gay marriage ban but sidestepped questions on whether clerks should be charged and what his personal views on gay marriage are now.

Three district attorneys running for attorney general — two Democrats and a Republican — said they would not issue charges against clerks and their area. A Democratic state representative running to succeed Van Hollen also criticized the idea of issuing charges.

“You do have many people in Wisconsin basically taking the law into their own hands and there can be legal repercussions for that,” Van Hollen said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “So, depending on who believes they’re married under the law and who doesn’t believe they’re married under the law may cause them to get themselves in some legal problems that I think are going to take years for them and the courts to work out.”

The Republican attorney general said he did not believe same-sex couples could be prosecuted but that county clerks risked charges.

………

County clerks can be jailed for up to nine months and fined up to $10,000 for issuing marriage licenses that aren’t allowed under state law. The same section of the statutes also provides penalties for judges, ministers and others who officiate over a “fictitious marriage,” but Van Hollen did not address whether they could be charged.

………

United States District Judge Barbara Crabb last week declared that Wisconsin’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the law. She has not yet entered an injunction instructing public officials what to do about her finding.

After all, who has to listen to some judge anyway?

Judge Crabb, could you please find this rat f%$# in contempt?

Why Yes, the NSA is a Tool of the Oligarchy, Why do You Ask?

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Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ryan Devereaux take another dive in lake Snowden, and discover that the NSA intercepts every single mobile phone call made in the Bahamas:

The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.

SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.

………

In addition, the program is a serious – and perhaps illegal – abuse of the access to international phone networks that other countries willingly grant the United States for legitimate law-enforcement surveillance. If the NSA is using the Drug Enforcement Administration’s relationship to the Bahamas as a cover for secretly recording the entire country’s mobile phone calls, it could imperil the longstanding tradition of international law enforcement cooperation that the United States enjoys with its allies.

“It’s surprising, the short-sightedness of the government,” says Michael German, a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice who spent 16 years as an FBI agent conducting undercover investigations. “That they couldn’t see how exploiting a lawful mechanism to such a degree that you might lose that justifiable access – that’s where the intelligence community is acting in a way that harms its long-term interests, and clearly the long-term national security interests of the United States.”

Once again, we see why intelligence agencies, particularly those in SIGINT, can never do decide woh to target, because they will take it all, damn the consequences.

When you let them run their own agendas, they are a clear and present danger to our national security interests.

One critique though, they buried the f%$#ing lede:

But the NSA documents don’t reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions – including numerous Western banks – that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who “arranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments” through the U.S. Postal Service.

They captured every cell phone call in a jurisdiction known for money laundering by tax evaders, organized criminals, arms dealers, and other illegal activity, and they are only going after people who are mailing pot to people who are mailing baggies of pot back home.

Think about it for a moment.

Spend billions on these capabilities, and then choose not to go after transnational criminals and tax dodgers .

Your tax dollars at work.

Fabulous!!!!

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Not only did a federal judge overturn Pennsylvania’s gay marriage ban, but he cited Antonin Scalia in his opinion:

Upon striking down Pennsylvania’s gay marriage ban Tuesday, a federal judge cited Justice Antonin Scalia’s “cogen[t]” argument that the Supreme Court had essentially paved the way for nationwide marriage equality last year.
Here’s the relevant passage from George W. Bush-appointed Judge John E. Jones III in his 39-page opinion:

As Justice Scalia cogently remarked in his dissent, “if [Windsor] is meant to be an equal-protection opinion, it is a confusing one.” Windsor, 133 S. Ct. at 2706 (Scalia, J., dissenting). Although Windsor did not identify the appropriate level of scrutiny, its discussion is manifestly not representative of deferential review. See id. (Scalia, J., dissenting) (observing that “the Court certainly does not apply anything that resembles [the rational-basis] framework” (emphasis omitted)). The Court did not evaluate hypothetical justifications for the law but rather focused on the harm resulting from DOMA, which is inharmonious with deferential review.

It was a reference to Scalia’s scathing dissent against the Court’s 5-4 opinion that struck down a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act which prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages. The Reagan-appointed justice warned that the majority decision — despite officially staying neutral on whether gay marriage was a Constitutional right — relied upon reasoning that would lead to that conclusion.

I will note that referencing a minority opinion does not seem to me to be a common thing, (Note however, that I an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit*) but this is the 2nd or 3rd time that a judge has cited Scalia in making a decision invalidating a gay marriage ban.

I’m beginning to think that the Federal Judiciary is conspiring to offer a very well deserved f%$# you to Fat Tony Scalia.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!!!

Fabulous!!!!!

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Gay Marriage is legal in Oregon:

Today Judge Michael McShane struck down Oregon’s discriminatory state constitutional amendment that denies committed gay couples the freedom to marry, ruling that it violates the U.S. Constitution. The ruling is the 17th consecutive victory in state and federal court for the freedom to marry since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Windsor v. United States in June 2013. The ruling is the 13th win in federal court for marriage since June.

The order is effective immediately – meaning that today, same-sex couples across the state will be able to marry!

Shorter New York Times, “We Pay Bros More than Ho’s”

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It was announced today that the New York Times fired Jill Abramson as executive editor.

It appears that this was largely because she complained when she discovered that her pay was significantly less than her predecessor, as well as one of her (male) subordinates:

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson, who spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, had been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, which accounted for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”

Of course, Abramson was good for business, and the paper is “financially beleagered” Sulzberger decided to build a palatial new headquarters for the paper, and use very short term debt to finance this, which required a refinance at junk bond rates from Mexican crony capitalist Carlos Slim, and a sale-leaseback of $¾ million square feet in their headquarters.

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. is letting his sense of entitlement show.

This is Good, But I Expect SCOTUS to Overturn it on Corporate “Free Speech” Grounds

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The NLRB is considering a ruling that would require that businesses allow their email systems being used for union organizing:

The NLRB has issued a “Notice and Invitation to File Briefs” [PDF] in the Purple Communications, Inc. case which could overturn the precedent concerning organizing activities on company email systems set by the board’s ruling in the Register-Guard case during the Bush Administration.

Using the Register-Guard decision as precedent, companies can currently enforce policies which prohibit company email from being used for anything but business purposes. But the current NLRB appears interested in reversing that decision partially due to the increased importance of email in organizing since the Bush era. Another goal is to align the ruling with other recent rulings that helped streamline the union election process.

This is a good idea, but it is a pro worker idea, so I expect a 5-4 decision from the Supreme Court overruling this on 1st Amendment grounds.

After all, if the DC, and the 4th Circuit, Courts of Appeals has already found that a requirement that employers post a notice of labor rights was a violation of the 1st Amendment, and the increasingly radical right wing of SCOTUS has become fairly explicitly partisan, and sabotaging labor organizing rights is good for the Republican Party.

It’s Only Metadata, Right?

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As David Cole observes, “We Kill People Based on Metadata:

Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress’s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development.

(Emphasis Mine)

The “signature strikes” that the CIA and Pentagon use are based entirely on metadata.

The next time that you hear of a wedding party being blown-up by a drone, realize that the same thing could happen to you on the basis of your cell phone location data.

Here is Something to Fill You With Dread………

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The Obama administration is proposing adding “papers, please” to the web:

A few years back, the White House had a brilliant idea: Why not create a single, secure online ID that Americans could use to verify their identity across multiple websites, starting with local government services. The New York Times described it at the time as a “driver’s license for the internet.”

Sound convenient? It is. Sound scary? It is.

Next month, a pilot program of the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” will begin in government agencies in two US states, to test out whether the pros of a federally verified cyber ID outweigh the cons.

………

To start, there’s the privacy issue. Unsurprisingly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately pointed out the red flags, arguing that the right to anonymous speech in the digital realm is protected under the First Amendment. It called the program “radical,” “concerning,” and pointed out that the plan “makes scant mention of the unprecedented threat such a scheme would pose to privacy and free speech online.”

And the keepers of the identity credentials wouldn’t be the government itself, but a third party organization. When the program was introduced in 2011, banks, technology companies or cellphone service providers were suggested for the role, so theoretically Google or Verizon could have access to a comprehensive profile of who you are that’s shared with every site you visit, as mandated by the government.

Post-NSA revelations, we have a good sense for the dystopian Big Brother society the EFF is worried about. As the organization told the Times, at the least “we would need new privacy laws or regulations to prohibit identity verifiers from selling user data or sharing it with law enforcement officials without a warrant.”

First, we need to be clear that the NSA would use this to track users whether or not they can get the rubber stamp FISA court to approve.

We know that they will, because that is what they do.

Second, to paraphrase Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith, PhD, any technology that the government can create will be duplicated by criminals, or the Chinese, or the Russians, or the Koch brothers.

The depressing thing is that I don’t think that Republicans have enough outrage left after, Bengazi! Bengazi! Bengazi!, and the Democratic establishment won’t challenge the US state security apparatus, at east not while one of their own is running it.

I hope that this goes the way of the Clipper chip, but I would not bet on this.

Not Dredd Scott Bad, but Maybe Plessy v. Ferguson Bad

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In a 5-4 vote the Supreme Court just ratified sectarian prayer at government meetings:

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that legislative bodies such as city councils can begin their meetings with prayer, even if it plainly favors a specific religion.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Christian prayers said before meetings of an Upstate New York town council did not violate the constitutional prohibition against government establishment of religion; the justices cited history and tradition.

“Ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this Nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond the authority of government,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court’s conservative majority.

The ruling reflected a Supreme Court that has become more lenient on how government may accommodate religion in civic life without crossing the line into an endorsement of a particular faith. All nine justices endorsed the concept of legislative prayer, with the four dissenters agreeing that the public forum “need not become a religion-free zone,” in the words of Justice Elena Kagan.

But there was sharp disagreement after that, and the majority ruling could encourage public bodies to give more leeway to religious expression in their ceremonial prayers and less deference to the objections of religious minorities.

The court’s five conservatives said legislative prayers need not be stripped of references to a specific religion — the prayers at issue often invoked Jesus Christ and the resurrection — and said those given the opportunity to pray before legislative meetings should be “unfettered” by what government officials find appropriate.

It is stupid, petty, small minded, and bigoted ruling.

I’m disappointed, but not particularly surprised.

I will say the fact that the bigotry-deaf Kennedy is now the “moderate vote” on the court.