The postal-spying screw-up reminds us that our Big Brother often seems to be Uncle Sammy's loopy brother Goofus

Confidential to budding spies: In general it's better not to share your "confidential" plot machinations with your investigation target.

by Ken

You've probably heard about this, from the NYT:

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

By RON NIXON
Published: July 3, 2013

WASHINGTON -- Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.

"Show all mail to supv" -- supervisor -- "for copying prior to going out on the street," read the card. It included Mr. Pickering's name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word "confidential" was highlighted in green.

"It was a bit of a shock to see it," said Mr. Pickering, who owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering's mail but told him nothing else.

As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States -- about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail. . . .

One reason I haven't been able to get quite as frenzied as some people concerning the details we've learned about the NSA'a massive surveillance program is my lack of confidence in our security people's ability to make much dangerous use of that massive pile of data.

As I understand it, our intelligence problem hasn't been so much a lack of data as an insufficient ability to process the data and make meaningful connections among and use of it. Partly this is because the sheer quantity of data is overwhelms the ability of analysts to know where to begin looking, and partly it's because the intelligence is split among so many agencies that have little will or capacity to share what they know.

Remember how we learned after 9/11 that potentially important pieces of intelligence simply never were properly appreciated or properly connected. Forgive my skepticism that simply piling massive new worlds of data to the stockpile will seriously change this situation, even if you factor in the gazillions of dollars thrown into the creation of our Brave New National Security World in the wake of 9/11.

You can find out lots more information about both the mail-covers program and the automatic mail tracking program in the Times piece, along with the expected concerns voiced about the invasions of privacy involved as well as already-reported claims of abuse (and naturally claims of intelligence coups). For the record, according to the Times article, "Postal officials refused to discuss either mail covers or the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program." Less clear is whether or how money being poured into these programs relates to the USPS's financial crisis.

Now at the risk of belaboring the obvious, one problem with the investigation of Leslie James Pickering is that it appears to have been carried out by Keystone Postal Cops. But there's another problem: the targeting of Mr. Pickering in the first place. Back to the article:

Mr. Pickering says he suspects that the F.B.I. requested the mail cover to monitor his mail because a former associate said the bureau had called with questions about him. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the Postal Service, the F.B.I. and other agencies, saying they were improperly withholding information.

A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Buffalo declined to comment.

Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out. He said he became tired of focusing only on environmental activism and moved back to Buffalo to finish college, open his bookstore, Burning Books, and start a family.

"I'm no terrorist," he said. "I'm an activist."

Mr. Pickering has written books sympathetic to the liberation front, but he said his political views and past association should not make him the target of a federal investigation. "I'm just a guy who runs a bookstore and has a wife and a kid," he said.

With regard to the larger NSA surveillance program, what's often forgotten as comedians take their obvious shots about the government reading our mail is that in that program this is not what's happening. The so-called analysts are using "metadata" -- compendia of data about calls that, when put together, presumably reveal, well, something or other. You get the feeling that the hope here is that the computers crunching all these jillions of info bytes will know, unlike the analysts who failed to connect the dots in the pre-9/11 intelligence, where to start looking for useful patterns. But somebody still has to create those algorithms or whatever sorting techniques are being used. Somebody still has to write programs to clue the computer in to what should be regarded as "suspicious."

Which brings us back to the targeting of Mr. Pickering. Maybe if the postal Sherlock Holmeses hadn't botched their investigation, they would have turned up information that showed the monitoring of his mail was a brilliant intelligence-gathering idea. In the absence of such information, however, it looks to me awfully like the FBI is stuck back in the era of J. Edgar Hoover: seeing in the espousal of nonconforming ideas the key to unraveling the insidious conspiracies of godless Communism, or whatever has taken the place of godless Communism in the paranoid imagination.

Buffalo bookstore owner Leslie James Pickering says, "I'm no terrorist. I'm an activist."

Which brings me back to the utterly credible fear that Aryeh Neier voiced recently with regard to the NSA revelations:

Any government agency that is able to gather information through political surveillance will be tempted to use that information. After a time, the passive accumulation of data may seem insufficient and it may be used aggressively. This may take place long after the information is initially collected and may involve officials who had nothing to do with the original decision to engage in surveillance.

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When we make "tradeoffs" for "national security," shouldn't we know what we're trading off?

"Since President Obama is asking us to trade some of our privacy with respect to our phone calls and our use of the Internet for greater protection against terrorism, at the very least we need to know exactly how our privacy is being violated."

-- Aryeh Neier, in a New York Review of Books blogpost,
"Spying on Americans: A Very Old Story"

by Ken

In this voluminous NYRB blogpost (I'm thinking it must be parked on the NYRBlog while awaiting inclusion in a future issue of NYRB), Aryeh Neier -- longtime national director of the ACLU, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and most recently president of George Soros's Open Society Institute -- opens with a little dark comedy, after reminding us, "There is nothing new about political surveillance."

One of the early practitioners, Joseph Fouché, the chief of police in Napoleonic France, supposedly had thousands of informers who sometimes acted as agents provocateurs. It is said that, on one occasion, two of his agents, unknown to each other, attended the same meeting where each proposed various revolutionary acts. Leaving at about the same time, they are reported to have arrested each other at the foot of the stairs.

Though the activities of the National Security Agency now in dispute are different than such earlier precursors, it is important to recognize that the older forms of surveillance persist. . . .

And he proceeds to give us a thumbnail history of both kinds of surveillance as practiced in modern times by the U.S. government, with a useful reminder that the precedents aren't encouraging: "Much of the political surveillance of the 1960s and the 1970s and of the period going back to the World War I consisted in efforts to identify organizations that were critical of government policies, or that were proponents of various causes the government didn’t like, and to gather information on their adherents."

"The NSA’s surveillance practices that have been revealed in recent weeks are fundamentally different," Neier writes.

They do not involve efforts to monitor the activities of individuals on the basis of their affiliations with certain organizations or causes. Rather, they attempt to identify the targets for surveillance through patterns of electronic behavior that arouse the government’s suspicion. Yet these new forms of surveillance, over time, may lead in the same direction. Those identified in this way may be excluded from certain benefits or opportunities on the basis of having been identified for engaging in activities that are legitimate. If that were to happen, they are unlikely ever to find out that they have been blocked on such grounds.

Perhaps more dangerously, Neier cites the experience of the FBI's 1956-71 Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPO, whose "purpose was to interfere with the activities of the organizations and individuals who were its targets or, in the words of long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, to 'expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize' them." The plug was only pulled because of the release to the press of seriously incriminating documents stolen by activists from a small Pennsylvania FBI office. (Hmm, stolen documents released by activists to the press, producing scandalous revelations. That could never happen again, could it?) Neier draws an interesting lesson from COINTELPRO:

any government agency that is able to gather information through political surveillance will be tempted to use that information. After a time, the passive accumulation of data may seem insufficient and it may be used aggressively. This may take place long after the information is initially collected and may involve officials who had nothing to do with the original decision to engage in surveillance.

Which leads him to a point that seems worth underscoring in the present noise about the NSA disclosures, offering an example that I think makes a good case for when we might be said to have legitimately accepted a tradeoff of rights for security.

President Obama has argued that we cannot have absolute protection against terrorism or absolute protection for privacy, and that some trade-off is necessary. That sounds reasonable. The difficulty with the president's formulation, however, is that we cannot know what trade-off is acceptable if the programs that invade our privacy are kept secret.

One area in which Americans have generally made peace with such a trade-off is air travel. Some people resent the screening of passengers at airport security as an intrusion on bodily privacy. Yet most Americans have accepted giving up a small amount of privacy in the interest of safety. We are able to do so because we know what is taking place and we can gauge the extent to which our privacy is compromised.

Since President Obama is asking us to trade some of our privacy with respect to our phone calls and our use of the Internet for greater protection against terrorism, at the very least we need to know exactly how our privacy is being violated. We also need to debate fully whether such measures uphold our Constitutional rights, such as the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of expression and the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Yet if the program is kept secret, and if even the court opinions stating the rationale for authorizing surveillance are kept secret, we cannot decide whether a trade-off is warranted; if it is warranted, exactly what should be traded; if constitutional rights are implicated, whether these are appropriate matters for a trade; or how we can impose limits on any trade so as to minimize the violation of our rights. A trade made in ignorance is not much of a trade.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, THE WASHINGTON POST
SENT OUT THIS "NEWS ALERT" THIS AFTERNOON

Google challenges U.S. gag order, citing First Amendment

Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it’s forced to give the government.

The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic.

VISIT THE STAND-ALONE SUNDAY CLASSICS WITH KEN

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Big Business Has A Friend-- Congress

Monday we looked at Jason Farago's definitive Cory Booker analysis in the Guardian. One conclusion that struck me was about his lackey-like relationship with Big Business in general and Wall Street in particular.

Booker has the unwavering support of the big bad industry just across the river from Newark. Since his days as a city councilor, he has hoovered up cash from the financial services sector-- but unlike many other tri-state Democrats who seduce the Street in a marriage of a convenience, Booker legitimately thinks that big money knows best and the public sector should do its bidding. When, in May 2012, Booker confessed that he found it "nauseating" for the Obama campaign to impugn Mitt Romney's career in private equity, Democrats were shocked. They shouldn't have been.

Booker's whole career has been a testament to a poisonous financial-corporatist consensus, which dresses up the interests of big money in post-ideological garb. (That helped him win the support this weekend of the most powerful man in New Jersey: George Norcross III, the feared political boss and owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who said he liked Booker because he was "a Democrat that's fiscally conservative yet socially progressive.")

Because I used to be a corporate CEO, I still get corporate CEO magazines and communications. One came this week that I actually opened instead of deleting. It was celebrating the easy access corporate CEOs and their agents have to Members of Congress. They cited a study based on a survey by George Washington University that included 328 congressional staffers from both sides of the aisle. No telling how many of their bosses are as subservient to Big Business as Cory Booker, but the study found that "65 percent of Hill staffers have a positive opinion of corporations-- calling them very or somewhat trustworthy. Additionally, the poll finds that 71 percent of Hill staffers found meetings with CEOs and top executives to be helpful when learning more about the issues that affect business." Just under half the Capitol Hill staffers surveyed say the same positive predisposition towards organized labor. 64% of Hill staffers said that meeting with corporate lobbyists was a helpful activity in formulating policy, while only 45% reported that meeting with labor lobbyists was useful.

This is great news for the business community since many corporations and associations host congressional fly-ins for their employees and membership base. A face-to-face meeting with a legislator helps you connect with your legislator and his or her staff on a personal level and can be important in building relationships for you and your organization. As proven by the study, elected officials enjoy meeting with their constituents, but many people compete for their time. When meeting with your elected official or staffer, be sure to remember the following to ensure an effective meeting:

Be Flexible
When scheduling an appointment, provide as much advance notice as possible and try to be flexible about dates and times. If you have to schedule a meeting on your own, keep in mind that your legislator will be able to spend more time with you if you schedule the meeting at his or her district office when Congress is not in session.

Be Prompt and Professional
Once you have made the appointment, be sure to keep it. It is wise to confirm your appointment a day or two in advance and plan to arrive a few minutes early. Dress professionally and make sure you are prepared to deliver your message persuasively.

Respect the Legislator’s Schedule
Remember that your legislator’s time is limited, and you are there to discuss important issues. Know in advance how long the legislator can speak with you and make certain the meeting does not exceed the allotted time. Be sure to stick to your topic, keep your comments and questions brief, and allow time for your legislator to ask questions and provide you with feedback.

Be Organized for the Meeting
Know your issue and the facts behind it thoroughly before you reach the meeting. If several people will be attending, designate one individual to act as spokesperson for the group and make sure you are all agreed on the message you are there to deliver. When you arrive at the meeting, introduce all of the attendees and allow the spokesperson to explain why you have requested the meeting. Be as specific as possible to help your legislator better understand the big picture.

Clearly State Your Position and Seek Feedback
Explain specific reasons you support or oppose the issue, including the impact of the issue on your business, your community, colleagues and industry. Stick to the issue at hand; bringing up other topics will lessen the force of your message. Ask your legislator’s position on the issue, but don’t try to force him or her to commit to a position. Request that you be kept updated on the issue and be sure to provide your contact information.

Avoid Arguing
While you are entitled to disagree with your elected officials, remember that you are not just there to win: You are there to build a positive relationship. Becoming argumentative will not help. Even if you are unable to persuade your legislator to your point of view, it is always best to leave on friendly terms so that you will be welcome another time.

Provide Leave-Behind Information
Whenever possible, leave appropriate documentation that supports your position with the legislator. Such leave-behind information will help the legislator remember your views and allow him or her to refer back to them after the meeting is over.

Follow Up with a Personal Letter
Be sure to send a thank-you letter after the meeting, regardless of whether you were able to reach an agreement. A thank you letter demonstrates that you appreciate the value of your elected official’s time and allows you to reiterate your position and underscore your concerns.

I bet it didn't take many personal follow up letters from Steve Jobs and Tim Cook of Apple to members of Congress to curry favor with the government, not if you read a new report from the Associated Press about domestic spying the same way I do:

Apple says it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data for the six months ended in May.

The company, like some other businesses, had asked the U.S government to be able to share how many requests it received related to national security and how it handled them. Those requests were made as part of Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies.

Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

Prism was revealed this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers, and has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.

Apple Inc. said that between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in data requests between Dec. 1, 2012, and May 31 from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters.

...Facebook Inc. has said that it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of last year. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.

I had dinner with an old friend over the weekend who designed-- and then ran-- a computer system for a sensitive division of one of Wall Street's biggest banks. He told me the feds asked them for access to between 30,000 and 50,000 individual accounts annually and claimed it was covered by "money laundering" statutes, although it was clear to the bank that very little of it involved a search for money launderers. The news didn't come as a surprise to me, just as the revelations in the press about Prism and other NSA domestic spying didn't come as a surprise to me. I have, after all, always taken President Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the power of the Military Industrial Complex to heart. He was certainly in a better position to understand it than any president who came after him.

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Iran, Syria, Obama-Bush and... Alan Grayson

If you read Ken's preview of the Iranian presidential election Friday night, you probably got the impression Hasan Rowhani was the guy we should be rooting for. By this morning he seemed to have a wide lead in the vote count, 51% against the 15% of his closest rival (hardliner Tehran Mayor Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, the Iranian equivalent of Ted Cruz or Louie Gohmert)-- enough to avoid a run-off next week. USA Today's coverage was even more upbeat about Rowhani than Ken was.

The man poised to take the Iranian presidency is a moderate-conservative known for his negotiating skill over the country's nuclear weapons program and a reformist some hardliners in Iran previously saw as too liberal and conciliatory, analysts say.

As a result, analysts predict Hasan Rowhani, who took a wide lead in early returns from Friday's election, might take the country's top political post and bring hope to the country's liberal classes but not wield any real power, especially on the nuclear issue.

"A president Rowhani would probably try to persuade the supreme leader that a deal on the nuclear issue would be in the interest of the Islamic Republic, especially if Rowhani believes that it is the only way to avoid a war," said Bruno Tertrais, a senior researcher at Fondation pour la Recherche Strategique (Foundation for Strategic Research) in Paris. "But (Supreme Leader) Khamenei will remain the ultimate decision-maker."

...In a sea of hardliners, a victory for Rowhani would be a win for reformist sentiment in Iran, observers say. During his candidacy, he attracted thousands to his rallies over his calls for an end to the repressive atmosphere prevailing in Iran-- including the lifting of economic sanctions that have crippled the economy and led to a spike in food and fuel prices-- and his pledge to open the door to more individual liberties and better relations with the West.

"We won't let the past eight years go on," Rowhani told crowds attending a pre-election rally. "(President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration) brought sanctions for the country and they are proud of it. I'll pursue a policy of reconciliation and peace, we will also reconcile with the world."

Still, even as his words lean liberal, Rowhani's background is firmly based in the political establishment of Iran.

A cleric, Rowhani first studied religion before graduating with a law degree in 1972, eventually earning a master's degree in law at Caledonian University in Glasgow, Scotland. He was swept up in the 1979 Iran's Islamic Revolution as a firm opponent to the shah and became an ally and part of the inner circle of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, serving in various roles in the government following Khomeini's ascension to power.

Regardless, some Iranians hold out hope that he will fulfill his promises due to his background as a skilled negotiator and conciliator. Rowhani served as head of the Supreme National Security Council during the presidency of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from 1989 to 1997. Following that, he was the country's top nuclear negotiator with the West from 2003 to 2005 during the administration of reformist leader Mohammad Khatami as the U.S. and other European allies grew concerned over Iran's nuclear program. He negotiated a temporary suspension in Iran's uranium enrichment activities.

When hardliner Ahmadinejad-- who is barred from seeking a third term-- took office in 2005, Rowhani resigned after arguments with the new leader.

Since then, Rowhani has remained in the background of reformist causes until earlier this year when the Guardian Council approved his candidacy and he earned the backing of Khatami and Rafsanjani who represent the liberal strain of Iranian politics.

Some Iranians remain hopeful that a Rowhani win could sway Iran to become more open and liberal.

A hopeful sign? Not everyone agrees. Alireza Nourizadeh is an Iranian scholar based in London. He warns that Rowhani "has always pretended to be a moderate, played the game really well and convinced voters he is a reformist by promising a different kind of conversation and behavior in the future. But I know this man-- he's the same man that served in the Supreme National Military Council for 24 years and called for the execution of student protesters (during the 1999 protests)." If the Supreme Leader allows Rowhani to become president-- and he did allow him to run-- then his first big test is sitting on his doorstep already: Syria... with a deadly little note from Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Hussein Obama.

I'm not going to start hyperventilating or speculating about Obama's motives or ambivalence. According to the Washington Post, though, the decision to involve the U.S. in a war to topple Assad, Iran's ally in Syria, was made some time ago, and the "evidence"-- probably trumped up evidence-- was just the kind of bullshit excuse they were waiting for, like the nonsense the Bush Regime presented to the American people to justify toppling Saddam Hussein and invading and occupying Iraq.

President Obama’s decision to begin arming the Syrian rebels followed more than a year of internal debate over whether it was worth the dual risks of involving the United States in another war and seeing U.S. weapons fall into the hands of extremist groups among the rebels.

The White House said the final push came this week after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded with “high certainty” that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons against the rebels.

But U.S. officials said that the determination to send weapons had been made weeks ago and that the chemical weapons finding provided fresh justification to act.

As Syrian government forces, with the help of Hezbollah and Iranian militias, began to turn the war in Assad’s favor after rebel gains during the winter, Obama ordered officials in late April to begin planning what weaponry to send and how to deliver it.

That decision effectively ended the lengthy disagreement among those in the White House-- primarily Obama’s political advisers-- who argued that providing arms would be a slippery slope to greater involvement, military leaders who said it would be too risky and expensive, and State Department officials who insisted that Syria and the region would collapse in chaos if action were not taken, officials said.

If you're wondering why many people who are not the Three Stooges (John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Amy Klobuchar) argue that Obama's excuses about starting a new war are pure bullshit, keep in mind that when Bush was pulling the same magic trick, it was McClatchy-- not the cheerleaders at the NY Times and Washington Post-- who saw through them and called them out. And McClatchy is reporting the distinct smell of another rat.

Chemical weapons experts voiced skepticism Friday about U.S. claims that the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad had used the nerve agent sarin against rebels on at least four occasions this spring, saying that while the use of such a weapon is always possible, they’ve yet to see the telltale signs of a sarin gas attack, despite months of scrutiny.

“It’s not unlike Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn’t bark,” said Jean Pascal Zanders, a leading expert on chemical weapons who until recently was a senior research fellow at the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies. “It’s not just that we can’t prove a sarin attack, it’s that we’re not seeing what we would expect to see from a sarin attack.”

Foremost among those missing items, Zanders said, are cellphone photos and videos of the attacks or the immediate aftermath.

“In a world where even the secret execution of Saddam Hussein was  taped by someone, it doesn’t make sense that we don’t see videos, that we don’t see photos, showing bodies of the dead, and the reddened faces and the bluish extremities of the affected,” he said.

Other experts said that while they were willing to give the U.S. intelligence community the benefit of the doubt, the Obama administration has yet to offer details of what evidence it has and how it obtained it.

White House foreign policy adviser Benjamin Rhodes gave dates and places for the alleged attacks-- March 19 in the Aleppo suburb of Khan al-Assal; April 13 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Shaykh Maqsud; May 14 in Qasr Abu Samrah in Homs province, and May 23 in Adra, east of Damascus. But he provided no details of the fighting that was taking place or the number of dead in each incident. He said the United States estimated that 100 to 150 had died in all.

“Ultimately, without more information, we are left with the need to trust the integrity of the U.S. intelligence community in arriving at its ‘high confidence’ judgment,” Greg Thielmann, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Arms Control Association, said in an email. While he said that “my guess is they have it right,” he also noted that the White House statement was “carefully and prudentially worded” and acknowledged the lack of a “continuous chain of custody for the physiological samples from those exposed to sarin.”

“It does not eliminate all doubt in my mind,” he said.

Philip Coyle, a senior scientist at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, said that without hard, public evidence, it’s difficult for experts to assess the validity of the administration’s statement. He added that from what is known, what happened doesn’t look like a series of sarin attacks to him.

“Without blood samples, it’s hard to know,” he said. “But I admit I hope there isn’t a blood sample, because I’m still hopeful that sarin has not been used.”

Even a proponent of the United States providing military assistance to the rebels raised doubts about the possible motive for announcing the chemical weapons conclusion.

In a passionate argument for U.S. involvement in Syria, Anthony Cordesman, a security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, wrote Friday that “the ‘discovery’ that Syria used chemical weapons might be a political ploy.” The phrase was in an article that described strong strategic and humanitarian reasons for involvement in the crisis, particularly the recent involvement of the Lebanese group Hezbollah on the side of Assad.

I know I promised to not hyperventilate but I just want to say one more thing about this catastrophic blunder Obama is making. The folks making the case that we need to provide arms to help prevent more deaths are virtually all bloodthirsty warmongers who would like nothing more than to see every Syrian dead. Likud-backers like Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Eliot Engel. and if you think you can ignore what President Eisenhower said about how the Military Industrial Complex would take over the country if we weren't vigilant (which we haven't been), I want to beg you to watch this video of Alan Grayson on the floor of Congress Friday afternoon. Big Brother flipped out. (By the way, most Members of Congress have NOT read the reports exposed by Glenn Greenwald and are virtually clueless about what the NSA has been up to-- yes most members of our watchdog Congress we're counting on to keep 'em on the straight and narrow.)

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Can Iceland Give NSA Whistle Blower Asylum Before The Gulag Swallows Him Up?

Predictably, uptight Military Industrial Complex shills like Peter King (R-NY) and Mike Rogers (R-MI), were on the Sunday TV gab fests howling for the blood of Edward Snowden, the 29 year old ex-NSA employee/technical engineer for defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden came forward and outed himself as the source of Glenn Greenwald's explosive exposé about NSA domestic spying in The Guardian last week. Eric Cantor chimed in this morning that the House investigation will be "very serious." Does that mean he won't give the investigation to GOP clown Darrell Issa? And does it mean the "very serious" investigation will be of the program itself, rather than of the whistleblower? Don't count on it. Watch Cantor dodge the few direct questions the corporate media talking heads asked him:



Snowden is in Hong Kong, and the U.S. has a bilateral extradition treaty with that... "country." Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald was on Morning Joe with the moron team. The video is up top and I strongly recommend you watch it. Glenn's point (in his TV appearances): the NSA leak doesn't jeopardize national security. "There’s not a single revelation that we’ve provided to the world that even remotely jeopardizes national security."

Greenwald warned that we haven't seen anything yet, compared to what The Guardian has coming. So will whistle-blower and patriot Edward Snowden wind up in some secretive star court and gulag the way Bradley Manning has? Probably-- and, sadly, with the blessing of most Americans. Or maybe Iceland will give him asylum.

When WikiLeaks burst onto the international stage in 2010, the small Nordic nation of Iceland offered it a safe haven. Now American whistleblower Edward Snowden may be seeking that country’s protection, and at least one member of its parliament says she’s ready to help. On Sunday evening Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir and Smari McCarthy, executive director of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, issued a statement of support for Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton staffer who identified himself to The Guardian newspaper as the source of a series of top secret documents outlining the NSA’s massive surveillance of foreigners and Americans.

“Whereas IMMI is based in Iceland, and has worked on protections of privacy, furtherance of government transparency, and the protection of whistleblowers, we feel it is our duty to offer to assist and advise Mr. Snowden to the greatest of our ability,” their statement reads. “We are already working on detailing the legal protocols required to apply for asylum, and will over the course of the week be seeking a meeting with the newly appointed interior minister of Iceland, Mrs. Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir, to discuss whether an asylum request can be processed in a swift manner, should such an application be made.”

It’s not yet clear whether Snowden has officially applied for asylum in Iceland. A press contact for the Icelandic Ministry of Interior, which handles asylum requests, said that he hadn’t yet seen an application from Snowden and that the ministry couldn’t comment until one was received.

Snowden, who left his home in Hawaii in May and is taking refuge in a Hong Kong hotel, noted his interest in seeking asylum in Iceland in The Guardian’s interview, telling the newspaper that his ”predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values, The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland,” he said. “They stood up for people over internet freedom.”

The 29-year-old intelligence analyst may have been referring to the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a group founded by Jonsdottir and McCarthy that has sought to strengthen Iceland’s protections for media outlets and whistleblowers. That project, which successfully passed a new source protection law in 2011, was propelled in part by Jonsdottir and McCarthy’s participation in WikiLeaks; Both Icelanders helped to publish the leaked Apache helicopter video that revealed the killing of civilians and journalists in Baghdad in April 2010.

“Over the last few days we at the International Modern Media Institute have watched alongside the rest of the world as the US government’s enormous encroachments on privacy and information security have been exposed in the media,” Jonsdottir’s and McCarthy’s statement reads. “These exposures have verified our greatest fears about the state of global intelligence gathering, and yet again highlighted the need for strong privacy protections and government transparency.”

Fly in the ointment: the most recent election in Iceland turned power over to a conservative government not all that likely to be as sympathetic to Snowden as anyone hopes-- if he can even get there, which sounds like a longshot to me considering where he is now.

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So America Decided To Turn Itself Into A Surveillance State?

The Patriot Act should have been repealed the second the Democrats won control of Congress. Instead, many Democrats worked with Republicans to keep it in place. Same for FISA. Now people are demanding Congress investigate the NSA's and Verizon's indiscriminate, bulk spying on American citizens. Congress? Investigate? What a joke! Congress is responsible for this-- and in a very conservative consensus ("bipartisan") way. Lindsey Graham, hardly an Obama apologist, was just on Fox saying "I’m sure we should be doing this.”

Yesterday, the NY Times slapped the Obama Administration down big time:

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive-- whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism-- especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

...This stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.

When FISA came up for reauthorization last year it passed the House in a landslide, 301-118. 74 Democrats joined 227 Republicans in favor, including Hoyer of course, but also, very disappointingly, Pelosi. Meanwhile 7 Republicans joined the 111 Democrats who opposed it. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison, rallied votes against it. The one member of the Democratic House leadership who bucked that leadership and voted "no" was Xavier Becerra (CA). It's worth noting that then-Senate candidates Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) voted "no" and were elected and wretched New Dem Shelly Berkley (NV) voted "yes" and was defeated.

Bernie Sanders wasn't as surprised as he was ready to tear someone's head off. "As one of the few members of Congress who consistently voted against the Patriot Act, I expressed concern at the time of passage that it gave the government far too much power to spy on innocent United State citizens and provided for very little oversight or disclosure. Unfortunately, what I said turned out to be exactly true. The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about. Congress must address this issue and protect the constitutional rights of the American people."

Voting with the Republicans in favor of reauthorizing FISA was one of the last votes in the dreadful careers of Jason Altmire (Blue Dog/New Dem-PA), Joe Baca (Blue Dog-CA), Howard Berman (D-Israel), Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Leonard Boswell (Blue Dog-IA), Ben Chandler (Blue Dog-KY), Mark Critz (PA), Kathy Hochul (New Dem-NY), Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA), Larry Kissell (Blue Dog-NC), Silvestre Reyes (TX), Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR), and Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC). Ed Markey (D-MA), who will face Massachusetts voters June 25, voted against reauthorizing FISA. The Republicans in opposition to Boehner and Obama on this included libertarian-leaning conservatives like Walter Jones (NC), Ron Paul (TX), Jimmy Duncan (TN), Tom McClintock (CA) and Justin Amash (MI).

And I might add that corrupt New Dem Colleen Hanabusa of Hawaii, currently challenging progressive Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, was a proponent of FISA, voted for it and continues to be one of the most shady Democrats when it comes to taking legalistic bribes from the worst players in the Military-Industrial Complex President Eisenhower warned us against. Hanabusa has been a real problem in the House and she wants to get into the Senate-- where she can do even more damage. You can help keep her out of the Senate by backing Schatz's reelection bid. He has a very different approach to domestic spying than Hanabusa:

"My first vote as United States Senator was against the FISA Amendments Act because it failed to provide transparency, accountability and reasonable limits when the federal government conducts surveillance for intelligence purposes. While I recognize that the FISA Amendments Act has helped to produce useful intelligence, I fear that we do not have a full understanding of the impact that this law has on the privacy of Americans. We need a comprehensive review of the FISA Amendments Act to ensure that Americans’ privacy and civil liberties are protected."

Not just different... better, much better.

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CISPA... Who Betrayed Us Yesterday And What It Means Now

2 who spoke up against Big Brother yesterday: Amash (R)  & Grayson (D)

We tried explaining CISPA on Wednesday when the House voted on a few amendments to CISPA that were permitted by Pete Sessions' very fascistic Rules Committee. The serious amendments that were offered by champions of individual liberty-- opponents of CISPA-- like Justin Amash (R-MI) and Alan Grayson (D-FL) were not allowed to even be voted on, ruled inappropriate by Sessions (R-TX). Amash's disallowed amendment was meant to "permit a company to provide through contract that it won't share personally identifiable information with the government." Sessions tossed it out unceremoniously. Grayson's amendment insisted on Constitutionally mandated search warrants.

Grayson’s amendment intended to protect Americans from cyber-security-related searches without a warrant, in keeping with the United States Constitution. The Fourth Amendment requires the government to obtain a warrant prior to conducting searches and seizures.

CISPA adds provisions to the National Security Act of 1947 related to cyber threat intelligence and information-sharing. The legislation has raised considerable privacy concerns amongst civil liberties groups, who worry that CISPA lacks provisions requiring the government to obtain a warrant when conducting searches based on cyber threat intelligence. The Obama Administration announced yesterday that it would not support CISPA in its current form, because of privacy concerns.

Despite these concerns, the House Committee on Rules rejected Grayson’s amendment, and offered no explanation for its rejection.

..."I offered a simple, straightforward amendment that would have protected American citizens from unreasonable and unconstitutional searches by the government under CISPA,” he said. “I’m disappointed that the Rules Committee refused even to allow this important amendment to be voted upon by the full House of Representatives."

CISPA passed Thursday afternoon 288-127, 92 mostly conservative Democrats joining all but 29 Republicans. Nancy Pelosi and Grayson rallied 98 Democrats against it. Obama has threatened to veto it in its current form. Among the Democrats making common cause with Boehner and Cantor Thursday were many of the usual suspects, Blue Dogs and New Dems, led by Steny Hoyer, Steve Israel, Jim Himes, Allyson Schwartz and Ron Kind. Some of the worst of Israel's right-of-center freshmen who backed CISPA Thursday were:

• Ron Barber (New Dem-AZ)
• Ami Bera (New Dem-CA)
• Bill Enyart (IL)
• Pete Gallego (Blue Dog-TX)
• Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ)
• Ann Kuster (NH)
• Dan Lipinski (IL)
• Dan Maffei (New Dem-NY)
• Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY)
• Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ)
• Eric Swalwell (CA)
• Juan Vargas (New Dem-CA)

Rob Zerban, who came closer to defeating Paul Ryan-- a big CISPA backer-- is probably going to challenge him again in 2014. Zerban is an advocate for Internet privacy and he opposed the bill. Right after the vote, he told me "I wish the Tea Party Republicans would get their story straight. With so many Senate Republicans citing privacy concerns while voting against bi-partisan, common sense background checks for gun purchases, it is the height of hypocrisy for House Republicans to turn around today to vote for expanding privacy violations in the name of a nonexistent threat to security. CISPA is the solution to a problem that doesn't exist, while expanding background checks for gun purchases could literally save lives. We need real representatives who want to solve real problems. The families of the victims of the Newtown shooting deserve better, and the people of Wisconsin deserve better."

Nick Ruiz is also up against a senior Republican CISPA backer, John Mica in the central Florida district just north of Orlando. Ruiz is also a dedicated privacy defender and he also said he would have voted against the bill: "John Mica voted: Yes, to government spying. I would have voted: No, to government spying. Which is to say, no, to intrusive Big Brother spying on citizens' private information as collected by private corporations for commercial purposes. Its been said that this bill effectively 'deputizes' corporations to spy on citizens and give that information to the government. It's interesting that the CISPA cyber-gestapo bill tellingly splits Democrats right down the middle. Alan Grayson, reliably held the line with a 'no' vote. And some of the far less reliably progressive Democrats (Pelosi, Wasserman Schultz et al.) came through with the correct 'no' vote, because they probably perceived it was 'safe' to do so. On the other hand, some of the more reliable progressives (Hastings, Brown, etc.) came out with an incorrect 'yes' vote.

"In the end however, it's clear that a whole swath of progressively-backed shills (Kuster, Kirkpatrick, Payne, Sinema, Murphy, Frankel, etc.) let America down with an incorrect 'yes' vote to government spying. And that is what is entirely unacceptable for the progressive community. And it's obvious why that is: an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation reported that the interests supporting the bill 'spent 140 times as much lobbying Congress as those on the other side of the debate and have dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders working on their behalf.' We can do better than people like this, who respond to lobbying pressure with open arms."

Andrew Zaleski at Technically Baltimore fleshed out what Nick was alluding to with the Sunlight Foundation report.

Supporters of the bill include big companies like Microsoft and Google, as well as major telecommunications firms, including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable. And, according to the political finance research organization MapLight, those supporters contribute a significant amount of money to the campaigns of national politicians in favor of CISPA:

• Pro-CISPA organizations and companies outspent CISPA opponents $55 million to $4 million in campaign contributions to House representatives from July 2010 through June 2012, two months after CISPA advanced through the House of Representatives the first time it was introduced, according to MapLight data compiled from OpenSecrets.org

• House Intelligence Committee members have benefited the most: they’ve received on average 15 times more money in campaign contributions from CISPA supporters than CISPA opponents, a fact Congressman Mike Rogers, CISPA sponsor and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, unwittingly tweeted-- and then deleted from his Twitter feed-- in late March.

Maryland’s own 2nd District representative Dutch Ruppersberger-- ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and co-sponsor of CISPA-- has received $162,510 from interest groups that support CISPA, with $22,000 in campaign contributions from AT&T, Comcast and Verizon alone, according to the MapLight data. Those contributions were made between July 2010 and June 2012.

The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers says this is another example of "corporate money drowning out the voice of the people. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act-- or CISPA-- is a vaguely-worded bill that could allow private e-mails, posts on social media, or personal information to be read by federal intelligence agencies like the NSA or law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. Even worse, following an intense lobbying campaign by private corporate interests, House Republicans have not allowed critical privacy amendments to fix the core problems with the bill... If CISPA becomes law, the federal government could have access to anything from private medical records to personal family e-mails.  And the large companies involved in sharing this private information will not be held responsible if they fail to make the right decisions with your personal information and about cyber threats."

Before the vote, Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) offered a Motion to Recommit-- backed by every Democrat plus libertarian Walter Jones (R-NC). It was designed to fix some of the flaws in CISPA:

•        This measure prohibits employers, a prospective employer, or the federal government from asking for the release of social networking passwords.

•        This final amendment prohibits the federal government from establishing a mechanism to control Americans’ access to the internet through the creation of a national internet firewall.

•        This measure requires an annual report on the number of Americans whose privacy has been breached by attack or intrusion.

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Big Brother Wants More, More, More-- Demands Apple Share Encryption Codes

If Obama isn't bad enough, imagine what's probably coming next

The Big Oil and Gas companies endangering the rest of society in their insane pursuit of profits, have refused to tell regulatory agencies which cocktail of toxic chemicals they shoot into the earth during fracking operations. They claim the formulas are "trade secrets." Apparently, our e-mails aren't.

The DEA has been trying to hack into Apple's encrypted messaging system but have thus far failed. They're making a lot of noise about Apple turning over the keys to the encryption technology to government agencies. The libertarian think tank, CATO, suspects the DEA whining could be little more than disinformation.

Tech news site CNET has an interesting, but I suspect somewhat misleading, story today suggesting that text messages sent via Apple’s iMessage service—an Internet-based alternative to traditional cell phone SMS text messages—are “impossible to intercept” by law enforcement. Yet that is not quite what the document on which the story is based-- an “intelligence note” distributed to law enforcement by the Drug Enfrocement Administration-- actually says.

The DEA memo simply observes that, because iMessages are encrypted and sent via the Internet through Apple’s servers, a conventional wiretap installed at the cellular carrier’s facility isn’t going to catch those iMessages along with conventional text messages. Which shouldn’t exactly be surprising: A search of your postal mail isn’t going to capture your phone calls either; they’re just different communications channels. But the CNET article strongly implies that this means encrypted iMessages cannot be accessed by law enforcement at all. That is almost certainly false.

...Which brings us to the question of why, exactly, this sensitive law enforcement document leaked to a news outlet in the first place. It would be very strange, after all, for a cop to deliberately pass along information that could help drug dealers shield their communications from police. One reason might be to create support for the Justice Department’s longstanding campaign for legislation to require Interent providers to create backdoors ensuring police can read encrypted communications-- even though in this case, the backdoor would appear to already exist.

The CNET article itself discusses this so-called “Going Dark” initiative. But another possible motive is to spread the very false impression that the article creates: That iMessages are somehow more difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement to intercept. Criminals might then switch to using the iMessage service, which is no more immune to interception in reality, and actually provides police with far more useful data than traditional text messages can. If that’s what happened here, you have to admire the leaker’s ingenuity—but I’m inclined to think people are entitled to accurate information about the real level of security their communication enjoy.

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