Welcome to the machine

“The fact is that anyone can read the plain text of the Patriot Act, and yet many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified.

“It’s almost as if there were two Patriot Acts, and many members of Congress have not read the one that matters.

“Our constituents, of course, are totally in the dark. Members of the public have no access to the secret legal interpretations, so they have no idea what their government believes the law actually means.”

— Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, in a Senate floor speech Thursday

One of the biggest disappointments of the Obama Administration has been the continuation of Bush era policies that have the potential to further erode privacy and civil liberties in this country. This week Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and New Mexico Senator Mark Udall raised the alarm about the recent extension of the Patriot Act and hinted that Obama's Justice Department might have even eclipsed the past administration at its increased snooping and cavalier disregard for certain rights we have long held dear in this country.

“When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.” Senator Ron Wyden

Because the Patriot Act was shrouded in so much secrecy that Americans don't even know what it entails, it is hard to speculate about the scope of the governmental surveillance that is raising the Senator's concern. Even our Senators and Congressmen are not allowed to know what the government's interpretation is, except for the members of one small select committee. But it seems to revolve around Section 215. This section allows investigators to "seize any "tangible things" they deem to be relevant to an investigation. They are not required to provide evidence demonstrating probable cause, as would be the case for a conventional search warrant. Tangible things can entail anything from phone records to hospital records, and can belong to third parties rather than terrorism suspects themselves."

According to Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute, the Justice Department employs a legal argument known as the "hybrid theory" that opens access to "pen registers," or data that allows investigators to roughly monitor someone's physical location through their cell phone. This ability to track a person's location, fused with the ability to obtain huge amounts of private records, could allow the government to know where many different people are at a given moment. It is possible that the use of the hybrid theory has allowed the government to spy on a broad swath of the American public, with no connection to terrorism, through use of "data mining" technology.

Some assert that the secret interpretation empowers the government to deploy ”dragnets” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

Surveillance under the business-records provisions has recently spiked. The Justice Department’s official disclosure on its use of the Patriot Act, delivered to Congress in April, reported that the government asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for approval to collect business records 96 times in 2010 — up from just 21 requests the year before. The court didn’t reject a single request. But it “modified” those requests 43 times, indicating to some Patriot-watchers that a broadening of the provision is underway.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Wired's Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

Wyden offered an amendment that would compel the Attorney General to “publicly disclose the United States Government’s official interpretation of the USA Patriot Act.” It refers to “intelligence-collection authorities” embedded in the Patriot Act that the administration briefed the Senate about in February.

Udall warned about the government’s “unfettered” access to bulk citizen data, like “a cellphone company’s phone records.” In a Senate floor speech on Tuesday, Udall urged Congress to restrict the Patriot Act’s business-records seizures to “terrorism investigations” — something the counterterrorism measure has never required in its nearly 10-year existence.

The government thinks that it is much ado about nothing. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said that Congressional oversight committees and a special panel of national security judges — known as the FISA Court — were aware of how the executive branch was interpreting and using surveillance laws.

“These authorities are also subject to extensive oversight from the FISA Court, from Congress, from the executive branch,” Mr. Boyd said.

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I worry about this law and I worry about this government. Creating an indeterminate war against an indeterminate enemy for an indeterminate period that allows to the suspension of rights to privacy, fair process and court ordered warrants seems like a fast track to a Kafkaesque police state. With the new DARPA style data mining technology, the government can not only monitor your communications but know your geo-location, friends you are associating with and brand of aftershave. What once was an emergency bill designed to ferret out terrorism is now an excuse for a wholesale spying operation on the American public.

Of course the standard response for many of my fellow citizens is "I have nothing to hide, let them look." And guess what my fellow citizens, they will.

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Obysmal

While I have no quarrel with many of President Obama's positions, his record has been rather abysmal in respect to civil liberties. I think that we expected more from the vaunted constitutional scholar. All I can say is thank god for both of the Senators from Oregon, the only two people in the Senate that appear to actually give a damn. My own Senator Feinstein seems to function more as a water carrier for the administration.

The President asks that we simply trust him, but strips away the opportunity for real oversight and accountability, even from Congress. Some would say that that mind set is the first step on the road to fascism.

"I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution." -- Barack Obama (March 2007)

Hmm, does he? Talk as they say, is cheap.

Today Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote an open letter to John Brennan, the CIA Chief in waiting, decrying his failure to provide Congress with the secret legal opinions defining the government’s capacity to pursue and kill US citizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.

Wyden has tried to get the information for two years, by law members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence  have access to classified legal opinions – but, Wyden writes, the Obama administration has denied him access to the opinions governing targeted assassinations of American citizens. From RT.com:

"The senator has also requested a list of countries in which the intelligence community has used its “lethal counterterrorism authorities,” saying that the committee has the right to know “countries where United States intelligence agencies have killed or attempted to kill people. The fact that this request was denied reflects poorly on the Obama Administration’s commitment to cooperation with congressional oversight,” the letter continues.
He also asks Brennan to prepare to discuss a massive recent Senate Intelligence Report on the CIA's torture techniques and interrogation methods. Wyden seems to be particularly interested in hearing about why the CIA “repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House, the Justice Department, and Congress.”
Brennan is chief counterterrorism advisor to President Obama, who nominated Brennan as his next director of the Central Intelligence Agency on January 7, 2013. Brennan now faces a Senate confirmation."

From EFF :

"Both in 2010 and 2011, Obama administration officials promised to work to declassify secret FISA court opinions that contained “important rulings of law.” These opinions would shed light on whether and how Americans’ communications have been illegally spied on. Since then, the administration has refused to declassify a single opinion, even though the administration admitted in July that the FISA court ruled that collection done under the FAA had violated the Fourth Amendment rights of an unknown number of Americans on at least one occasion.
Starting with the precept that “secret law is inconsistent with democratic governance,” Sen. Jeff Merkley’s amendment would force the government to release any FISA court opinions that contain significant interpretations of the FISA Amendments Act so the American public can know how it may or may not be used against them."

Secrecy News writes of an administration that due to Congressional laxness (ineptitude?) is now no longer accountable to anyone.

Missile Dread. Read this article regarding the harm that drone strikes are doing to United States image globally.

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Shortly after the President was elected he issued a memorandum promising more openness and transparency in his administration. It was titled,“Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies” on “Transparency and Open Government.”

"I direct the Chief Technology Officer [Aneesh Chopra (since succeeded by Todd Park)], in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive."

By all objective accounts, his policy has not been effective, if anything he is less transparent than his predecessor. 19 out of 20 Obama cabinet agencies have failed to respond to FOIA requests as required by his directive.

“We were pretty excited when he first came in about his commitment to transparency — that seemed pretty good compared to the Bush years,” said Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an open-government group. “Unfortunately, it hasn’t panned out that way. If anything, the Obama administration is less transparent than prior administrations.”

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More on FOIA. The FOIA Whiteout.

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The President has a very mixed record in regards to whistleblowers, prosecuting some of them very aggressively under the Espionage Act.

"The Obama administration has charged more people (six) under the Espionage Act for the alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined. (Prior to Obama, there were only three such cases in American history, one being Daniel Ellsberg, of Nixon-era Pentagon Papers fame.) The most recent Espionage Act case is that of former CIA officer John Kiriakou, charged for allegedly disclosing classified information to journalists about the horrors of waterboarding. Meanwhile, his evil twin, former CIA officer Jose Rodriguez, has a best-selling book out bragging about the success of waterboarding and his own hand in the dirty work."

Obama has recently signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and his signing statement is causing more tremors with potential whistleblowers. The text of the NDAA expanded whistleblower protections for employees of defense contractors who expose waste and corruption. President Obama’s signing statement announced that the administration could ignore that provision because it “would interfere with my authority to manage and direct executive branch officials.” Experts are worried that this signing statement will actually remove the inherent protections offered in the bill.

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The Department of Justice record has been quite atrocious, the draconian penalties and intimidation used by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz in the prosecution of people like Aaron Swartz is shocking. Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann now has the suicides of two hackers on his record. Try for three, Stevie? Swartz disseminated widely available information as a political statement for free access and was treated worse than a murderer or rapist. Interesting questions over at TechDirt. Why was the Secret Service involved at all in the Swartz case?

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From HuffPo John W. Whitehead 11/13/2012 - Our Civil Liberties: What Exactly Is Obama's Track Record? 

"Not only did Obama continue many of the most outrageous abuses of the George W. Bush administration (which were bad enough), including indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance of American citizens, but he also succeeded in expanding the power of the "imperial president," including the ability to assassinate American citizens abroad and unilaterally authorize drone strikes resulting in the deaths of countless innocent civilians, including women and children.
Obama has a lot to account for over the course of his first four years in office, particularly in terms of the erosion of our civil liberties. Just consider some of the assaults on our freedoms that took place under Obama's watch, either as a result of his continuing Bush's policies, enacting his own misguided policies or simply because he did nothing to counter them.
In March 2009, only two months after being elected, Obama defended Bush's unconstitutional National Security Agency spying program in court. Obama went so far as to insist that actions authorized by the president, including illegally spying on American citizens, should be free from any judicial scrutiny whatsoever.
In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security launched a program, Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be "disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war." Coupled with the DHS' report on "Rightwing Extremism," which broadly defines right-wing extremists as individuals and groups "that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely," these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government -- whether it be an Occupier, Tea Party supporter or a free speech protester.
In July 2009, Obama threatened to veto an oversight bill that would have required the president to inform lawmakers about covert CIA activities.
In February 2010, the Department of Defense issued a U.S. Army field manual detailing the prospective internment and resettlement of American citizens in the event of another terrorist attack or natural disaster on U.S. soil. The leaked document confirmed the fears of many government critics, "from the Patriot movement on the right to Occupy on the left to Anonymous, anarchists, organized racists, survivalists, and plain old conspiracy theorists in between."
In June 2011, a Department of Education "SWAT team" forced their way into the home of a California man, handcuffed him, and placed his three children in a squad car while they conducted a search of his home, allegedly over falsified student loans. Raids of this type are becoming increasingly common -- more than 50,000 such raids occur every year in America -- with federal agencies such as the State Department, Department of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service laying claim to their own SWAT teams. Also in June 2011, the FBI granted its 14,000 agents expansive additional powers, allowing them to investigate individuals using highly intrusive monitoring techniques, including infiltrating suspect organizations with confidential informants and photographing and tailing suspect American citizens, without having any factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing.
In September 2011, two American citizens were killed during a drone attack in Yemen as part of a government "kill list" operation in which Obama personally directs who should be targeted for death by military drones. Drone strikes, a signature policy of the Obama administration, have tripled since Obama took office.
In December 2011, the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which mandates that anyone suspected of terrorism against the United States be held in military custody indefinitely. This provision extends to American citizens on American territory. It was quietly signed into law by Obama on New Year's Eve.
In February 2012, Obama signed the FAA Reauthorization Act, which opens up American skies for the domestic use of armed surveillance drones, a $30 billion per year industry. Incredibly, no civil liberties protections for Americans were included in the legislation. By 2020, it is estimated that at least 30,000 drones will be crisscrossing the nation's skies equipped with anti-personnel weapons and surveillance devices.
In March 2012, Congress overwhelmingly passed and Obama signed the anti-protest "Trespass Bill" -- legislation that makes it a federal crime to protest or assemble in the vicinity of protected government officials. The bill's language is so overly broad as to put an end to free speech, political protest and the right to peaceably assemble in all areas where government officials happen to be present. That same month, Obama issued an executive order stating that in the case of a war or national emergency, the federal government has the authority to take over almost every aspect of American society.
In April 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court -- again at the urging of the Obama administration -- declared that any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials without reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is carrying a weapon or contraband.
In July 2012, the Obama administration began allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to store and "critically assess" information on innocent Americans for up to five years. Data recorded by the NCTC includes "records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records," among other things.
In September 2012 and in the months preceding it, in major cities across the country, including Boston, Miami, Little Rock, and Los Angeles, the U.S. military carried out training exercises involving Black Hawk helicopters and uniformed soldiers. The exercises occurred in the middle of the night, with the full cooperation of the local police forces and generally without forewarning the public.
In October 2012, it was revealed that the Obama administration has been "secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the 'disposition matrix.'" The matrix goes beyond the president's kill list to detail suspects beyond the reach of American drones. This disposition matrix is also overseen by the NCTC."

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Obama's backtracking on state's rights in regards to respecting medical marijuana laws is legendary. The Ogden memo, various campaign promises, all evaporated at some point in his first term like, well, smoke.

Add the ineptitude of Eric Holder's g-men in Operation Fast and Furious and you have a Justice Department simply out of control. Couple that with an SEC that lets the big guys walk and has a nasty habit of letting the banks get a wrist slap and a fine and then settle without admitting any culpability. HSBC launders billions in drug profits and walks away scot free. Aaron Swartz is hounded to death. And I guess we shouldn't forget that Obama's DOJ gave immunity to the people who tortured for George Bush.

The fact that things might be even worse under a Romney Administration is immaterial. If we want to keep our intellectual integrity we need to ask hard questions of our elected officials and demand that they respect and represent our constitution no matter what party they belong to. This President's record in these matters is seriously blemished. Maybe even worse than Bush.

Rubbing elbows

There were a bunch of celebrities and politicos flitting around Santa Fe. I forget all the musicians, wasn't paying too much attention. Karl Rove was two tables over when we had breakfast at the La Fonda. He seems almost balanced compared to ... never mind.

I made a feeble and insincere attempt to charge Morty and my breakfast to Rove's room before fessing up with our server.

Laura Bush was at Whitehawk with her entourage.

A tall guy walks in to my booth with his wife. "Wait, I know you," I said. He smiled. He was out of context, I couldn't quite place him.

His wife tells me that he is actually Ron Wyden, the senator from Oregon. Maybe my favorite Senator, definitely the greatest defender of civil liberty and privacy rights we have in our nation.

I went full bore sycophant. "I love you man." After extricating me from my prostrate and genuflecting grip on his ankles, he thanked me very graciously for my overbearing affections.

Said he would have his homies take a look at my blog.

Wyden can appear quite stiff and wooden on the television, but he is a loose, easygoing, great guy in person. Real thrill for me. We need more courageous men like Wyden, men with heart and sekel.

6.24.13

Was Michael Hastings the victim of a car hack? From HuffPo:

"There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers" -- including the United States -- know how to remotely seize control of a car."
Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard Clarke

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Senators Wyden and Udall write General Alexander a letter, which questions his veracity in regards to NSA's Section 702 Fact Sheet Inaccuracy. But it is illegal for them to get specific. So much for transparency.

Wyden and Udall Letter to General Alexander on NSA's Section 702 Fact Sheet Inaccuracy by Senator Ron Wyden

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Interesting to see how many "liberal" journalists are carrying water for the establishment regarding the Snowden disclosures. I was reading from Edward Bernays 1928 book Propaganda yesterday and found this quote:

“But being dependent, every day of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources.” 

Bernays (1891-1995) was Sigmund Freud's nephew.

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"In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits, where a woman can get cleaned out," said state Rep. Jodie Laubenberg (R), sponsor of the controversial SB 5, according to The Associated Press.

Texas has just approved the most draconian abortion policy in the nation. This woman has just showed the world the breadth of her ignorance, the function of rape kits is to provide evidence of a rape, not "clean a woman out."

Not to be outdone, Texas wacko congressman Louie Gohmert says that sex education programs are straight out of Soviet Russia. What he doesn't get is that the highest national rates of teen pregnancy are in the red states, obviously the parents aren't doing too good of a job either.

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Poor George Zimmer. I liked the guy, he had the huevos to stand up for decriminalization. Don't think that I will buy another thing from Men's Warehouse.

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Clarence Thomas is whining about Affirmative Action. He actually compared it to slavery today in his opinion. Which is rich, because the program allowed him to enter Yale Law School and to subsequently get a job clerking for John Danforth, and finally sit on the nation's highest court. He said that he still couldn't get the good jobs like the white kids when he left school but it looks like he has done all right to me. But he makes a good argument actually. He has been an abysmal justice, mute for the last eight years, bitter, with a king sized chip on his shoulder, or is it a can of coca cola? He is a total embarrassment who should be grateful that he was given an opportunity and now wants to deny others of his race the same opportunity he got.

And I guess that Justice Alito has been a complete dick.

Spooky

"The leadership of your agencies built an intelligence collection system that repeatedly deceived the American people." Senator Ron Wyden

NSA is collecting and compiling all of your social network data.

Senators blame public and media for NSA fallout, ask patsy questions.

Senators push to preserve NSA status quo - NYT

Christopher Boyce on Snowden - Wired

Feds Targeted Snowden’s Email Provider the Day After NSA Whistleblower Went Public - Wired

NSA spied on Senators, political enemies, scribes, Buchwald, MLK, Ali, etc.

Official sidesteps questions on NSA and cellphones - My hero, Senator Ron Wyden, master of the leading question.

Sen. Ron Wyden: NSA 'repeatedly deceived the American people' - Glenn Greenwald

NSA employees spied on personal love interests - Guardian

We tried to stay for the better part of seven years inside the government trying to get the government to recognize the unconstitutional, illegal activity that they were doing and openly admit that and devise certain ways that would be constitutionally and legally acceptable to achieve the ends they were really after. And that just failed totally because no one in Congress or — we couldn't get anybody in the courts, and certainly the Department of Justice and inspector general's office didn't pay any attention to it. And all of the efforts we made just produced no change whatsoever. All it did was continue to get worse and expand.
Ex NSA Official Bill Binney

Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker

Spooked

“When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.” Senator Ron Wyden

In late May I wrote about the dire warnings issued by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden concerning Obama Administration privacy and secrecy abuses. This President, who campaigned on a platform criticizing his predecessors use of the Patriot Act to spy on innocent americans, has apparently outbushed Bush. Unfortunately, we will probably never know the magnitude of the intrusion since it is all cloaked in national security paranoia and doublespeak.

The Obama Administration rebuffed Senator's Wyden and Udall in a letter published yesterday. Kathleen Turner, director of legislative affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said that a joint oversight team “has not found indications of any intentional or willful attempts to violate or circumvent” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA, which was amended in 2008.

The ACLU released a report on the government secrecy today which can be read here. The report was written by Mike German, a former FBI undercover agent, and Jay Stanley. The government made a record 76.8 million classification decisions in 2010 according to the report, some of the redactions and classifications placed on the most banal material, long de-classified or in the public domain. The government tried to charge an ex NSA employee for using the word fiber optic in a missive, the charges were ultimately thrown out of court.

This is one of the paragraphs in the preface:

...the framers of our Constitution established a system of checks and balances among
separate, co-equal branches of government to curb abuses of power and suppress the natural tendency of government to encroach on individual rights. Our current national security secrecy regime threatens to destroy this careful balance. The power to hide government actions from public accountability is simply too great an invitation to abuse. Congress has the power and the duty under our Constitution to remedy this situation. The American people depend upon their elected representatives in Congress to oversee and regulate the government’s activities on their behalf and for their benefit.

Unfortunately, even many of our elected representatives have no idea what the government is doing and how they are spying on ordinary americans. They are not allowed to know. Our own Senators.

The report excoriates the Obama Administration for abusing the privacy and secrecy laws and for its casual and convenient use of the states secrets privilege. I really recommend that you read the report in its entirety. It shows that contrary to his rhetoric, Obama has prosecuted whistleblowers he promised to protect and also kept the leaden veil over prior torture abuses. He has in some cases been worse than his predecessor in many respects in regards to protecting american's civil rights and liberties. The constitutional scholar.

Also, in 2010, the Obama DOJ issued a secret OLC opinion that re-interpreted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to allow the FBI to ask telecommunications companies to provide them with certain telephone records on a voluntary basis, even where there is no emergency and no legal process, such as a Grand Jury subpoena, National Security Letter or court order.


Ironically, the FBI sought the OLC opinion after the DOJ Inspector General criticized the FBI for using “exigent letters” and other informal requests to illegally obtain communications records in violation of ECPA. The IG report said, “we believe the FBI’s potential use of [REDACTED] to obtain records has significant policy implications that need to be considered by the FBI, the Department, and the Congress.”


Unfortunately, DOJ has not released the OLC opinion, so the public has no way of understanding how the government can obtain their telephone records without legal process.


While the IG report reveals the existence of this secret OLC opinion, it is redacted in a manner that masks the provision of law in question, the types of telephone records the FBI seeks access to, and the legal arguments supporting its interpretation. The OLC opinion has not been released. In a letter denying a McClatchy News FOIA request for the OLC opinion, DOJ may have revealed the provision of law that is being reinterpreted.


According to the Washington Post, there are 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 
private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security 
and intelligence, and an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances.


In 2009, the Government Accountability Office estimated that about 2.4 million Department of Defense civilian, military and contractor personnel hold security clearances at the confidential, secret and top secret levels.


 Remarkably, this figure does not include personnel at intelligence agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Intelligence Authorization Act of 2010 required the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to calculate and report the aggregate number of security clearances for all government employees and contractors to Congress by February 2011, but the DNI has so far failed to produce this data.


According to the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), the government made a 
record 76,795,945 classification decisions in 2010, an increase of more than 40% from 
2009. ISOO changed the way it counted electronic records in 2009 so exact year-to-year 
comparisons are not possible, but this figure is more than eight times the 8,650,735 classification decisions recorded in 2001.  One-fourth of the security classification guides the government used in 2010 had not been updated within five years as required.


“Derivative classification” in particular has exploded. Fully 99.7% of classification decisions are not made by the government’s trained “original classification authorities” (OCAs), but by other government officials or contractors who may have received little or no training and wield a classification stamp only because they work with information  derived from documents classified by OCAs.


Document reviews conducted by ISOO in 2009 discovered violations of classification rules 
in 65% of the documents examined, with several agencies posting error rates of more 
than 90%. Errors which put the appropriateness of the classification in doubt were seen 
in 35% of the documents ISOO reviewed in 2009, up from 25% in 2008. A similar analysis was not included in the 2010 ISOO report.


The cost of protecting these secrets has also skyrocketed over the last several years. ISOO estimated security classification activities cost the executive branch over $10.17 billion in 2010, a 15% increase from 2009, and cost industry an additional $1.25 billion, up 11% from the previous year. A meager 0.5% of this amount was spent on declassification. The government spent only $50.44 million on declassification in 2010, which is $182.74 million less than it spent in 1999. The fact is, there are significant physical costs associated with protecting our secrets, and unnecessary classification wastes security resources.


Refused to declassify information about how the government uses its authority under section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect information about Americans not relevant to terrorism or espionage investigations.


These are just a few areas of concern covered by the report. Too many people have potential access to our private information and we can't know, why, what, or where. The last paragraph I cite is the most chilling and troubling to me. When did we decide as an American people that our government was entitled to read, vacuum or datamine our private communications, without a warrant, clear reason or a probable cause to search?

"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a
prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance;
and the people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power,
which knowledge gives." Letter from James Madison to W.T. Barry (Aug. 4, 1822)

“Our constituents, of course, are totally in the dark. Members of the public have no access to the secret legal interpretations, so they have no idea what their government believes the law actually means.”
— Sen. Ron Wyden


I found an interesting new blog today - Steven Aftergood's Secrecy News.

The new surveillance state

It all happens so quickly...Congress goes into matador mode today and refuses to discuss Rule 41. It goes into effect tomorrow. The government will now be able to illegally hack innocent victims of a botnet.

Many thanks to Senator Ron Wyden for sticking up for American citizens' constitutional rights to privacy and unregulated search and seizure. More here.

“At midnight tonight, this Senate will make one of the biggest mistakes in surveillance policy in years and years,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who tried with Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) to offer three measures to delay or rein in the new FBI powers. “Without a single congressional hearing, without a shred of meaningful public input, without any opportunity for senators to ask their questions in a public forum, one judge with one warrant would be able to authorize the hacking of thousands, possibly
millions of devices, cell phones and tablets.”

In the final analysis we surrender our rights so meekly and passively.

Hasn't he suffered enough?

You would think that liberals would have better things to do than pick on poor Justice Clarence Thomas. The guy just can't catch a break. 

First it was that damn Anita Hill, then it was all the free trips with Harlan Crowe.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.

News today that a wealthy health care executive loaned him the money for a fancy $267,000 motor home and then forgave him for everything but twenty thousand of the interest on the debt.

The drip, drip, drip of new ethics questions about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's ethics continued Wednesday. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., disclosed that documents turned over to the committee indicate that Thomas benefitted by having some or all of a $267,000 loan forgiven in order to purchase a luxury RV.

Like who hasn't had something like that happen to them? Sounds like a good friend, buying him a Prevost. Probably got paid back in spades, if not honest friendship. Is it his fault he has a better class of friends than we do?

Besides, like the book says, ol' Clarence is a man of the people.

In fact, he and Ginny like to park the rig at Walmart when touring the countryside and hang out with the regular folk.

brown on the outside and rich white filling...

You think he still finds time to hang out with the brothers?

It turns out that Clarence forgot to report this one too.

Hey, he has a lot on his mind, his wife helping plan the January 6 insurrection and everything. 

Give him a break, alright?

Government creep

I forgot to mention something that went across the radar last week. This article at WaPo; Senators seek IG probe of border agency’s warrantless use of phone location data.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials who have used cellphone location data to track people inside the country without a warrant are refusing to tell members of Congress what gives them the legal right to do so, a group of Democratic senators said Friday.

The story goes like this, the fourth amendment precludes searches without a warrant and a 2018 SCOTUS decision forbade the practice and found law enforcement authorities must obtain a warrant before gathering location data from Americans’ phones.

The CPB says that they are legal but won't say how or why.

In a statement to The Washington Post, CBP asserted without explanation that the agency “may obtain access to commercially available information relevant to its border security mission.” It also said: “All CBP operations in which commercially available telemetry data may be used are undertaken in furtherance of CBP’s responsibility to enforce U.S. law at the border and in accordance with relevant legal, policy, and privacy requirements.”

I love Senator Wyden and I hope he comes down hard on these guys. By the way, ICE and CBP are also running facial recognition software without a warrant, another constitutional intrusion. Perhaps we will get a new administration soon that will respect the law of our land. Amazing that Customs believes that they are not accountable to Congress.

Strange Bedfellows

In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens. The Administration has taken various proactive steps to advance this debate including the President’s meeting with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, his public statements on the disclosed programs, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s release of its own public statements, ODNI General Counsel Bob Litt’s speech at Brookings, and ODNI’s decision to declassify and disclose publicly that the Administration filed an application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. We look forward to continuing to discuss these critical issues with the American people and the Congress. However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation. White House statement - Office of the Press Secretary 7/23/13

Wow. The President let us know that the Administration filed an application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It is going to be a new day in Washington...

Funny how things are shaking down in Washington re: surveillance. Republican Rep Justin Amash's bill to limit NSA data collection methodology was narrowly defeated the other day, 215 to 205. The bill would have allowed agency officials to continue collecting telephone records, but only for people connected to relevant ongoing investigations.

The proposal would also have required that secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court opinions be made available to lawmakers and that the court publish summaries of each opinion for public review. The two programs in question both allowed the government to collect the data records of hundreds of millions of Americans and also allowed the NSA to sweep up internet usage data from around the world that goes through nine major U.S.-based providers.

As noted by many, the left wing joined the right wing against the middle on this one. You had Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss parading around like bff''s representing the surveillance status quo establishment on one side and Amash and John Conyers representing the wingnuts on the other. Very strange bedfellows.

I don't have the energy to run this into the ground this afternoon but one thing about the Obama administration's response regarding this crap really makes me laugh.

The White House called the amendment an attempt to “hastily dismantle” counterterrorism tools and “not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.” Oh now you want to have an informed, open or deliberative process? Now that you have been Snowdened, after years of rebuffing Udall and Wyden, now you are suddenly putting your cards on the table. And we are supposed to believe you? Because things are going to be somehow different now that you have been caught and found out.

People are pissed and the issue is not going to simply go away. According to a McClatchy-Marist poll, 56 percent of Americans now believe that the government has gone too far in its collection of personal data. A Washington Post-ABC News poll this week shows that 74 percent of those surveyed believe NSA surveillance of telephone records intrudes on the privacy rights of some Americans. The Patriot Act will not be renewed in its current form. Supposedly, we have a say in all this too. We assume certain candidates will represent our interests and sometimes we guess wrong. Our bad.

Obama promised transparency and then went Dick Cheney on us. Remember that Obama Change website that made all sorts of transparency promises? It has mysteriously disappeared from the internet. Luckily, cached copies live forever.

The fact that there is a FISC does not reassure most americans concerned about this literally unwarranted intrusion. Not with their perfect batting average. When people have attempted to sue the government they are told that they can not prove standing or that their suit's disclosure would somehow negatively impact national security.

Sorry Mr. President, we have seen the Prism wizard behind the curtain. We will have a hard time ever trusting or believing you again.

"Have 12 years gone by and our memories faded so badly that we forgot what happened on Sept. 11?" Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the Intelligence committee, said in pleading with his colleagues to back the program.

We keep getting 9/11 thrown in our faces. You remember 9/11, don't you? The part where Richard Clarke warned the Bush administration that terrorists were planning on flying planes into our buildings? The information was already there. The failure was in getting Condoleeza Rica and the administration to get off their asses and do something about it. Data was not the problem. Smarts was the problem. Every american was distraught about 9/11, if we thought that it was worth trading our freedom for we would certainly let you know.

"We Should Have Had Orange or Red-Type of Alert in June/July of 2001"
By Eric Boehlert Salon.com 3-26-4
A former FBI translator told the 9/11 commission that the bureau had detailed information well before Sept. 11, 2001, that terrorists were likely to attack the U.S. with airplanes.
A former FBI wiretap translator with top-secret security clearance, who has been called "very credible" by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has told Salon she recently testified to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the FBI had detailed information prior to Sept. 11, 2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted.
Referring to the Homeland Security Department's color-coded warnings instituted in the wake of 9/11, the former translator, Sibel Edmonds, told Salon, "We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available." Edmonds is offended by the Bush White House claim that it lacked foreknowledge of the kind of attacks made by al-Qaida on 9/11. "Especially after reading National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice where she said, we had no specific information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they might use airplanes. That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's a lie."

Report Warned Of Suicide Hijackings CBS News 5-17-22

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives ... into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House." --1999 federal report

 

(CBS) Two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, an analysis prepared for U.S. intelligence warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon.

 

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said. The Bush administration has asserted that no one in government had envisioned a suicide hijacking before it happened.

 

     * RICE CLAIM: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02

 

* FACT: On August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." In July 2001, the Administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles. [Source: NBC, 9/10/02; LA Times, 9/27/01]

12.16.13

Keyhole Man - © Robert Sommers 2013

A Federal Judge believes that the Prism NSA Surveillance operation is likely unconstitutional. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush, said that the program, leaked by Edward Snowden earlier this year, appears to violate the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which states that the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."

“"The Fourth Amendment typically requires 'a neutral and detached authority be interposed between the police and the public,' and it is offended by 'general warrants' and laws that allow searches to be conducted 'indiscriminately and without regard to their connections with a crime under investigation.' 

" I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval,” Leon wrote in his 68 page ruling.

"The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the Government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979."

Hmmm.

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The San Diego Union Tribune ran an apology this weekend after running an ad for the Western American and Gun show right next to the story about the recent school shooting in Colorado.

The bizarre juxtaposition was first noticed by Dave Holland of City Beat, who tweeted the picture. The Tribune was quick to apologize.

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I dig this Pope. Rush Limbaugh be damned, I love this guy. This is the Pope I have been waiting for my whole life. New sheriff in town. Very decent man. Time to kick ass and take names.

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Megyn Kelly. Yawn.

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Tony Soprano, er, Chris Christie's, main political consigliere David Wildstein has apparently bought up all the choice websites of his don's potential political opponents. In other places this kind of behavior would stink like a Jersey waste management company but in Trenton it's called business as usual.

He may be a real lovable guy and everybody loves a fat man but what do you get when you dig down deep? First the vindictive bridge scandal, now this. Oh New Jersey, you are the best.

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Interesting to see more intrusive surveillance and a ratcheting down on civil liberties post Snowden in both France and Japan. No one wants to be the last police state on the block.

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One of the more interesting parts of Judge Leon's ruling was his calling bullshit on the Justice Department's stance that the defendants in the surveillance lacked standing because who knew if Verizon was actually getting bugged?

In his ruling, Leon rejected the government’s argument that Klayman and a co-plaintiff — the father of an NSA cryptologist killed in Afghanistan in 2011 — lacked standing to bring the suit because they were customers of Verizon subsidiary Verizon Wireless, which has not been publicly revealed as taking part in the program. “The government,” he said, says it has created a “comprehensive” database — “in which case, the NSA must have collected metadata from Verizon Wireless, the single largest wireless carrier in the United States.” Yet, at the same time, he wrote, the government asserts that the plaintiffs lack standing “based on the theoretical possibility” that the NSA has not collected Verizon’s records. “Candor of this type defies common sense and does not exactly inspire confidence!” he wrote. To draw an analogy, he wrote, omitting Verizon Wireless, AT&T or Sprint “would be like omitting John, Paul and George” and building a “Ringo-only database.”

This is the kind of sophistry and gamesmanship on the part of our government that makes me frankly, sick. Thank you Wyden, thank you Udall, thanks you Leahy, thank you Judge Richard Leon.

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Blast viewing is way up in the last two months. Not near as high as it was pre tantrum but well over twelve hundred people a day and steadily climbing. Maybe some day I could write for a living. That would be nice.