Category: Hypocrisy

What a Surprise, General Alexander Lied

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The NSA still is not sure what information Edward Snowden took from the NSA, despite the firm assurances of NSA Chief Gen. Keith Alexander:

More than two months after documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden first began appearing in the news media, the National Security Agency still doesn’t know the full extent of what he took, according to intelligence community sources, and is “overwhelmed” trying to assess the damage.

Officials, including NSA Director Keith Alexander, have assured the public that the government knows the scope of the damage, but two separate sources briefed on the matter told NBC News that the NSA has been unable to determine how many documents he took and what they are.

Sources said authorities believe the trove of unreleased materials includes details of data collection by U.S. allies, including the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These English-speaking allies, known along with the U.S. as the “Five Eyes,” are critical to U.S. intelligence efforts.

So, not only is the NSA lying with impunity, but they cannot find their ass with both hands.

That makes me feel much better about their spying on me.

Drip, Drip, Drip………

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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.

More Lying Liars

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This time it’s Attorney General Eric “Place” Holder, and he is lying about prosecutions for mortgage fraud.

Not only did he puff up the about the numbers and amount of mortgage prosecutions, but the DoJ retroactively edited the transcript of his speech on this subject:

Not sure that even the Bushies ever tried pulling the “modify the text of old archived speeches a year later” trick.

Yes, this is a level of mendacity that would impress Karl Rove.

Michael Bloomberg Gets a Well Deserved Smackdown on Stop and Frisk

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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.

Lying Liar

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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.

The Corrupt Educational Industrial Complex In a Nutshell

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Tony Bennet, who has been Florida commissioner of Education of 7 months just got fired resigned because it was discovered that he fabricated the ratings of a politically connected Charter school at his last position:

A national leader in the Republican effort to overhaul public education resigned as Florida education commissioner Thursday, amid allegations that when he ran Indiana’s schools, he changed the state grade of a charter school founded by a prominent GOP donor.

 In a resignation letter that surprised many, Tony Bennett dismissed the brewing scandal as “malicious and rooted in unfounded allegations” but said that it had created “a distraction from important work” and that he was leaving his post immediately.

The move came two days after the Associated Press reported that it had acquired e-mails written by Bennett in 2012, while he was running Indiana’s schools, in which he directed his staff to change the state grade for Christel House Academy. The charter school was founded by Christel DeHaan, who has given more than $2.8 million to Republicans since 1998, including $130,000 to Bennett.

 The school, which had been kindergarten through eighth grade, added grades nine and 10 in 2012, and test scores from the new students were low enough to pull down the school’s rating from an A to a C on an A-to-F scale.

At Bennett’s direction, staff used a loophole in regulations and removed the scores of ninth- and 10th-graders, bringing the school’s grade back up to an A. Bennett has said that changing the grade made the rating system credible because he knew Christel House to be a high-performing school.

 The Indiana State Teachers Association thinks otherwise. “It’s time to call the Tony Bennett letter-grading scandal exactly what it is — cheating,” union officials wrote in a statement. “There are no excuses for the actions taken by Bennett and his staff, as revealed in the string of e-mails, other than favoritism, cronyism, self-interest and hubris — none of which has a place in public school policymaking.”

He lost his last job in Indiana when voters tossed his sorry ass out in the 2012 elections, because the voters saw through his bullsh%#.

But Republicans, and the educational reform establishment didn’t see his bullsh%$.

Case in point, the biggest stars in the anti-teacher pro-privatization education establishment,  Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, and Bush’s  Chiefs for Change coalition, all just just offered a full throated endorsement of this ratf%$#.

This is not a an anomaly.   We now know that Rhee’s “success” was built on altered tests, and the former head of the Atlanta schools, Beverly Hall, has been literally been charged with racketeering.

The goal of people like this is to destroy the public schools and the teachers’ unions, so that private operators and their Wall Street backers can make bank, not to help our kids.

There are real problems with the education that our children receive in the US, but the biggest problem is that there are more poor children in the US, and the poverty is more intense, than in the rest of the industrialized world.

Wall Street and Their Evil Minions™ cannot help with that.

In fact, their role in our economy has to been to exacerbate these problems.

A New Definition of Chutzpah………

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Know your meme

Yes, John Pike, infamous as the Pepper Spray cop in Berkeley, who subsequently became a meme, and is now a poster boy for the banality of evil, has now filed for workmans’ comp:

The former UC police officer who was internationally condemned for pepper-spraying demonstrators at UC Davis is seeking workers’ compensation, saying he suffered psychiatric injury as a result of the November 2011 incident.

 John Pike has a settlement conference set for Aug. 13 in Sacramento, according to the state Department of Industrial Relations’ website and an Associated Press report.

 Pike was fired in July 2012, eight months after a task force investigation found that his action was unwarranted.

I’m beginning to think that the only folks out there with a bigger sense of entitlement than Congressional Republicans Newt Gingrich are bad cops.

Whenever the worm turns, and the scrutiny that they apply to others is applied to them, they employ every trick in the book to avoid justly deserved consequences.

Just When You Thought that Obama’s Secrecy Fetish Could Not Get Any More Reprehensible………

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I present to you the case of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who was imprisoned at the demand of the US government because he revealed that it was a US drone strike, and not a Yemeni army attack, that killed 41 civilians in al-Majalla in 2009.

His “trial” was condemned as a kangaroo court by numerous human rights group, and when the President of Yemen wanted to pardon him because of internal protests, Barack Obama personally called him to brow beat him into extending his detention.

Well, Shaye has now been released, but the official wheels in the Obama administration continue to try to grind him to dust:

News broke yesterday afternoon that, after a nearly three-year-long imprisonment, Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye had been released by the Yemeni government. Shaye’s work drew international attention in 2009 when he reported on a U.S. airstrike in the Yemeni village of al-Majalla that killed 41 civilians. He also conducted multiple interviews with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

 U.S. officials, including the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, have told journalists that Shaye facilitated AQAP attacks, but his accounts of his arrest detail press intimidation by the Yemeni government, then still headed by Ali Abdullah Saleh, who resigned amid mass protests in November 2011. Shaye’s five-year prison sentence has drawn criticism from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation of Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Yemen-based Freedom Foundation.

 The U.S. government is still concerned about Shaye. Bernadette Meehan, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told FP this morning by email, “We are concerned and disappointed by the early release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who was sentenced by a Yemeni court to five years in prison for his involvement with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” Meehan did not comment on whether the United States advocated against his release.

This is so repulsive on so many levels.

Barack Obama Reveals that he is Black

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Barack Obama has spent pretty much all of his time on the national stage trying to avoid the accusation that he is the stereotypical “Angry Black Man“, and so, with the brief exception (which he walked away from as quickly as he could) of a comment on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.

This is why Obama saying that 35 years ago that he would be Trayvon Martin was such a big deal:

Barack Obama used an unexpected speech at the White House to personally address the debates over race relations that have convulsed America since George Zimmerman was acquitted over the shooting of the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.

In remarks immediately interpreted as the most expansive comments on race since he became president, Obama said the US was still not “a post-racial society”.

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is: Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” he said.

But once again, it appears that Obama immediately followed this up by pandering to bigots racial profilers by floating the name of New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who has aggressively profiled blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims:

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama endorsed New York City police commissioner, and stop-and-frisk cheerleader, Ray Kelly as an adequate replacement for Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security. Under Kelly, the New York Police Department’s policy on randomly stopping people in the streets and then questioning and patting them down for weapons and drugs, imposed a stiff burden on black and Latino residents. According to the ACLU in New York, between 2002 and 2011, black and Latino New Yorkers made up close to 90 percent of those stopped by police — 88 percent of whom had no weapons or drugs on them when it happened. Kelly has staunchly defended the policy regardless of the racial profiling it codifies and its fruitless conclusions.

But Obama told Univision on Wednesday that “Kelly has obviously done an extraordinary job in New York,” and that the police commissioner is “one of the best there is” — an “outstanding leader in New York.”

“Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is,” said Obama. “But if he’s not I’d want to know about it. ‘Cause, you know, obviously he’d be very well qualified for the job.”

This endorsement seems tone deaf given the current conversations nationwide around national security. Kelly’s “extraordinary” work in New York City has led to the city council passing the Community Safety Act, which scales back the police’s ability to racially profile considerably. Kelly’s stop-and-frisk policy is being challenged in federal court by the Center for Constitutional Rights right now. Obama’s own Justice Department may be sending in a federal monitor to ensure that NYPD stops racial profiling. The following, questioning and apprehension of targeted black males is at the crux of the current debate around George Zimmerman’s killing Trayvon Martin.

Also, you have to read the New York Times OP/Ed by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

It was candidate Obama who in 2008 pledged to “ban racial profiling” on a federal level and work to have it prohibited on the state level. It was candidate Obama who told black people that if they voted they would get a new kind of politics. And it was State Senator Obama who understood that profiling was the antithesis of such politics. Those of us raising our boys in the wake of Trayvon, or beneath the eye of the Demographics Unit, cannot fathom how the president could forget this.

Of course, the best argument against allowing Ray Kelly anywhere near law enforcement are the words of Ray Kelly, who, writing in (where else) The Wall Street Journal, where he engages in transparent lying to defend his career:

Since 2002, the New York Police Department has taken tens of thousands of weapons off the street through proactive policing strategies. The effect this has had on the murder rate is staggering. In the 11 years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, there were 13,212 murders in New York City. During the 11 years of his administration, there have been 5,849. That’s 7,383 lives saved—and if history is a guide, they are largely the lives of young men of color.

So far this year, murders are down 29% from the 50-year low achieved in 2012, and we’ve seen the fewest shootings in two decades.

He knows that these numbers are reflected nationwide in any number of cities with all sorts of different sorts of police tactics.

He knows these numbers, and the reason that he lies about this is because the only way that he can defend his contemptible policies is to misrepresent his numbers, and what they mean.

Silly Rabbit, Extradition is for Other Countries

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Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Rome, was arrested in Panama on an Italian warrant after he was convicted in absentia for kidnapping Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr and sending him to Egypt to be tortured.

Less than 24 hours later, he was on his way back to the United States, free from any legal jeopardy:

Former CIA Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, who was convicted in Italy of kidnapping an Egyptian Muslim cleric and recently arrested in Panama, is headed back to the United States, a State Department spokeswoman said on Friday.

“It is my understanding that he is in fact either en route or back in the United States,” said Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman.

So he’ll probably never face trial for this.

In an interview, he invoked the good German defense:

He was quoted as telling Il Giornale newspaper in 2009 that he was not guilty and was carrying out orders from his superiors.

Just following orders. I thought that Nuremberg settled this matter. This is not supposed to be a valid defense.

But don’t worry, he has already suffered great punishment:

Also in that interview, he said he had wanted to stay in Italy but his retirement villa with vineyards had been seized to cover court costs.

Compare this to what is looking at Edward Snowden.

Note also the case of Posada Carriles, who blow up a civilian airliner, but lives in safety in the United States.

What Stefan Svallfors Said

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He has nominated Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize as a way for the Nobel committee to atone for giving the aware do Obama:

In his letter addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Stefan Svallfors praised Snowden for his“heroic effort at great personal cost.” He stated that by revealing the existence and the scale of the US surveillance programs, Snowden showed “individuals can stand up for fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“This example is important because since the Nuremberg trials in 1945 has been clear that the slogan ‘I was just following orders’ is never claimed as an excuse for acts contrary to human rights and freedoms,” Professor Svallfors wrote.

He emphasized that the decision to award the 2013 prize to Edward Snowden would also “help to save the Nobel Peace Prize from the disrepute incurred by the hasty and ill-conceived decision to award US President Barack Obama 2009 award.”

Not being George W. Bush is an insufficient reason to give someone a f%$#ing Nobel f%$#ing Peace prize.

If the Washington Post Were to Replace Richard Cohen with Pat Buchanan………

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No one could tell the difference, except that Pat is a more interesting writer.

So, it’s OK to stalk a black boy in a hoodie because he’s a black boy in a hoodie, just like when he said that it was OK for jewelers to refuse to allow black people into their stores.

He also decided that the Polanski child rape was no big deal, basically because he likes Chinatown.  (I would note that there are legitimate issues of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct, which are serious issues, but Cohen, and the almost as awful Anne Applebaum, are just horrible human beings.)

I do not understand why Cohen is not sweeping floors for a living.

I Think that Carl Levin Just Suggested that Obama Fire James Clapper

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Seeing as how Levin is one of the most intelligence agency friendly Senators, so the fact that he is subtly suggesting that DNI Clapper be fired is a significant thing:

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said Tuesday that he was “troubled” by the testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and was unsure how Clapper could be held accountable.

………

The testimony prompted criticism from lawmakers and led to some calls for his resignation over the false testimony.

Levin said he wouldn’t go that far but suggested that the only way Clapper could be held accountable was if President Obama fired him.

“I’m troubled by that testimony, obviously,” Levin said at a breakfast roundtable hosted by The Christian Science Monitor.

“How do you hold him accountable? I guess the only way to do that would be for the president to, somehow or other, fire him,” Levin added. “I think he’s made it clear that he regrets saying what he said. I don’t want to call on the president to fire him, although I’m troubled by this.”

Actually, the distinguished gentleman from Michigan does want Clapper fired, he would not have brought it up, and then dismissed the suggestion, if he did not want Clapper gone.

Well Duh!

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The Washington Post notes that, “Lawmakers say administration’s lack of candor on surveillance weakens oversight.”

Gee, you think?

Lawmakers tasked with overseeing national security policy say a pattern of misleading testimony by senior Obama administration officials has weakened Congress’s ability to rein in government surveillance.

Members of Congress say officials have either denied the existence of a broad program that collects data on millions of Americans or, more commonly, made statements that left some lawmakers with the impression that the government was conducting only narrow, targeted surveillance operations.

The most recent example came on March 12, when James R. Clapper, director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the government was not collecting information about millions of Americans. He later acknowledged that the statement was “erroneous” and apologized, citing a misunderstanding.

“Misunderstanding,” my ass.

Clapper was given a day’s notice that the question was going to be asked, and he was given an opportunity to further clarify immediately after the fact.

He simply lied, because he knew that he could.

I Liked Him Better as Ford Prefect

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Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) volunteers to be force fed to show what it’s like for the Guantanamo detainees. (Not for the faint of heart, I felt ill after watching)

Note that they stopped when he asked. In our Gulag in the Caribbean, they don’t stop, and it goes on for 2 hours ……… Twice a day.

Because torturing people who have been cleared of any crime, because Barack Obama lacks the balls to let them out, is what we have become as a society.

And still, the Republicans are working on a phony IRS and Benghazi scandal, instead of this, or his coddling the banksters.

There are very real crimes here, and the Republicans cannot bring themselves to complain about the torture of non-white people.

And this will be the response from the Obamabots:

American Extremists - Food for thoughtlessness

Food for thoughtlessness

Adding Chris Hayes to the List

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The list of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off, of course.

Here is an essay worthy of Keith Olbermann’s best special comments.

He notes that by any rational standard, the officially sanctioned leaks over the last few days are almost certainly more damaging to national security than anything that Edward Snowden has released to date.

He demonstrates how leaks, even potentially damaging ones, are acceptable, so long as they serve to glorify our state security apparatus:

H/t Digby.

Talk About Irony

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Glenn Greenwald lives in Brazil because DOMA does not recognize his partner for the purposes of immigration, and Brazil does.

With DOMA being overturned, it means that if he were to move back to the United States, his partner would get a spouse visa:

Glenn Greenwald has been living in Brazil (where he has a permanent visa*) for the past eight years with his partner, David Michael Miranda. Now that the Defense of Marriage Act has been struck down, Greenwald says they’re considering moving back to the United States.

Here’s how he described his reason for moving in an interview with Out Magazine in 2011:

Brazil recognizes our relationship for immigration purposes, while the government of my supposedly “free,” liberty-loving country enacted a law explicitly barring such recognition.

Does Wednesday’s ruling mean Greenwald will move back? Here’s what he said in an email to Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon today:

 It’s certainly something we’ll consider. It’s a huge choice with many complicated factors, and it’s not the kind of thing you seriously evaluate when the option isn’t available to you. We haven’t made up our minds in the 90 minutes or so since the decision was announced!

 We’ve lived here together for 8 years and built a life. My partner is finishing school. All of his family is here. So it’s something that will take time to resolve. But it’s definitely something that we both have a desire at some point to do, and will now spend the time figuring out how and when we can do it.

What is also clear is that, at least until Barack Obama leaves office, is that he, and his partner, would be mercilessly targeted by the authorities if they would set foot back in the United States because of their roles in exposing the NSA spying on US citizens.

So now, because he has effectively been declared an enemy of the state, he cannot safely exercise he new rights his partner got today.

Welcome to the United States of Kafka.

The NSA is Channeling Joe McCarthy

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There are 205 … 57 … 52 … 81 … Communists …ψ

So, the NSA is claiming that their anti-privacy drift net, “helped foil more than 50 attacks.”

A few days ago, they were claiming around 20.

And, of course, “Helped foil” isn’t defined, because … Secret.

Recently disclosed National Security Agency surveillance programs have helped disrupt more than 50 “potential terrorist events” around the world over the last 12 years, according to U.S. intelligence officials, who described the spying operations as tightly regulated and extremely useful.

 The officials, testifying Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee, identified two new cases — an alleged plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange, and a U.S. resident who helped finance a terrorist group in Somalia — that they said proved the value of collecting domestic telephone calling records and monitoring foreign Internet traffic.

 Most of the plots were foiled by surveillance of foreigners overseas, the kind of spying the NSA has done since it was created in 1952 to monitor communications and other so-called signals intelligence.

 The surveillance programs “are critical to … our nation and our allies’ security,” said Gen. Keith Alexander, who heads the NSA and the Pentagon’s U.S. Cyber Command. “They assist the intelligence community efforts to connect the dots.”

It’s possible that General Alexander was telling the truth, but considering the fact that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper deliberately perjured himself before Congress without any consequence, I would be inclined to believe that best, this is an example of “truthiness”, and they chose a number and cherry picked cases to hit that number.

It’s possible that the General is telling the truth, and not engaging in spin.

It’s also possible that I greeted my Sharon* in in bed this evening, wearing nothing but a towel with a chrysanthemum between my teeth.†

The US state security apparatus has used secrecy and deception to justify their program secrecy and deception. Absent a massive and complete declassification of data, Alexander, or Clapper, or Brennan, or for that matter, Barack Obama, are simply not credible sources.

Secrecy and hoovering up everything are an end in and of itself for the NSA and its ilk, and it is up to the political leaders to reign them in.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
†Actually, not possible. She is violently allergic to the insecticide pyrethrin, which is a naturally occurring substance extracted from chrysanthemums. I have no comment on whether I did so with a rose between my teeth.‡
‡Let me state for the record that a moment of stunned silence, followed by a nervous chuckle, might be the world’s most effective form of birth control.
ψJoe McCarthy made claims that there were numerous Communists employed by the State Department. His numbers kept changing.

The Word for This is Desperation………

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Yes, the NSA is now saying that it will provide information about how it’s rapacious thirst for our personal data stopped some terrorists at some point:

The National Security Agency (NSA) plans to release details of terrorist attacks thwarted by its controversial bulk surveillance of Americans’ communications data, a senior US senator said on Thursday.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California), the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, would provide “the cases where this [surveillance] has stopped a terrorist attack, both here and in other places” as early as Monday.

Here is the important quote:

But the FBI director, Robert Mueller, forcefully defended the programs on Thursday to the House judiciary committee by saying the broad surveillance could have foiled the 9/11 attacks and averted “another Boston”.

But this program has been going on for years, and Boston happened.  Why didn’t it do it then?

They are trying to blow smoke up our ass.