Democrats ridicule Republicans for their top two presidential frontrunners, the blowhard Donald Trump and the somnolent ignoramus and proto-fascist Ben Carson. But when you stop to think about it, how is the outwardly cool calm and collected Barack “Kill List” Obama less nutty than Trump or Carson?
Marketed as pro-privacy reform of the rancid Patriot Act, the USA Freedom Act is about to become law. Though nothing could be further from the truth, many Americans will believe that the NSA is being reined in, and move on another issue.
The Freedom Act has been characterized as another vindication of Edward Snowden — and, considering the fact that we wouldn’t be discussing the balance between individual privacy rights and national security if he hadn’t made the NSA’s spying against us public, it is.
We’re also being told that the Freedom Act will protect us from the NSA.
It won’t.
“This is more than symbolic,” said Georgia Tech professor Peter Swire, who worked on an Obama task force that studied NSA surveillance in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
No. It isn’t.
Symbolic is exactly what the Freedom Act is.
As The New York Times reports, most of the fascism-lite Patriot Act will remain in force under the Freedom Act: “only three provisions that temporarily expired Monday are now at issue, two of which have apparently been used only rarely.” The Freedom Act mainly affects the collection of “telephony metadata”: times of phone calls, the numbers of you called and were called from, how long you were on the phone, where you were, etc.
Telephony metadata is the tip of the iceberg.
Programs like Gumfish, through which NSA agents turn on Americans’ computer cameras to spy on them at their homes — and take photos of them nude and/or while having sex— are unaffected. So will programs like Mystic, which records and stores the voice recordings of your calls for at least five years. As I write in my upcoming biography of Snowden, so do many, many of the NSA’s Orwellian assaults on decency and personal freedoms.
Within the narrow sphere of telephony metadata, the Freedom Act creates one major reform: “it would take the government out of the business of bulk collection of telephone and Internet data like the numbers, times and duration of phone calls, leaving that information in the hands of telecommunications companies instead. But the government would still have the power to systematically gain access to the data in order to analyze indirect links between callers, just as it had under the old program.”
How exactly will the NSA “systematically gain access” to metadata under the Freedom Act? It will file a request with the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court.
Which will always say yes.
The FISA Court, which never hears from privacy advocates or a lawyer for the victim being targeted, is a rubber stamp for the government. It approves every request for spying on Americans: 1856 out of 1856 in 2012, for example. In 2011, 1674 out of 1674. In 2010, 1506 out of 1506.
You get the picture.
The NSA will still get your metadata. They’ll just have to file some paperwork to get it.
The Freedom Act sucks.
What should Congress have done instead?
If an individual were breaking as many laws as the NSA, he’d face life in prison, or execution. If a corporation — one that wasn’t politically connected — were breaking as many laws, its directors would be prosecuted and it would be shut down. The bar for government conduct should be at least as high as for you and me.
As we’ve learned from Snowden, the NSA is a rogue agency.
Here’s what would fix the problem: the NSA should be shut down. Its top officials, and those of its affiliated private contracting firms, should be imprisoned. So should every public official who approved their disgusting espionage against us.
What about the terrorists? Don’t worry; we’ll still be safe. There is no evidence — zero — that the NSA has disrupted a single plot against the United States since 9/11.
Even by the incremental standards of contemporary reform, the Freedom Act is some ridiculously weak tea.
Meaningful reform would have taken the NSA out of the spying-on-Americans business entirely. After all, that’s what their charter requires. They’re only supposed to spy on foreign “signals intelligence.” Overseas. Not here.
Significant reform would have shut down all of the programs revealed by Snowden, including Mystic and Gumfish and the like.
The Freedom Act leaves us with empty symbolism.
At bare minimum, the NSA should have to apply for a search warrant from a real federal court — as opposed to the joke that is the FISA court — when it wants the phone company to turn over your telephony metadata.
“In legislation no bread is often better than half a loaf,” the progressive Robert La Follette observed a century ago. “Half a loaf, as a rule, dulls the appetite, and destroys the keenness of interest in attaining the full loaf.” With the Freedom Act, Americans are being asked to settle for a crumb.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Edward Snowden has been vindicated.
This week marks the first time that a court – a real court, not a sick joke of a kangaroo tribunal like the FISA court, which approves every government request and never hears from opponents – has ruled on the legality of one of the NSA’s spying programs against the American people.
Verdict: privacy 1, police state 0.
Yet the police state goes on. Which is what happens in, you know, a police state. The pigs always win.
A unanimous three-judge ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, states unequivocally that the Obama Administration’s interpretation of the USA Patriot Act is fatally flawed. Specifically, it says, Congress never intended for Section 215 to authorize the bulk interception and storage of telephony metadata of domestic phone calls: the calling number, the number called, the length of the call, the locations of both parties, and so on. In fact, the court noted, Congress never knew what the NSA was up to before Snowden spilled the beans.
On the surface, this is good news.
It will soon have been two years since Snowden leaked the NSA’s documents detailing numerous government efforts to sweep up every bit and byte of electronic communications that they possibly can — turning the United States into the Orwellian nightmare of 1984, where nothing is secret and everything can and will be used against you. Many Americans are already afraid to tell pollsters their opinions for fear of NSA eavesdropping.
One can only imagine how chilling the election of a neo-fascist right-winger (I’m talking to you, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker) as president would be. Not that I’m ready for Hillary “privacy for me, not for thee” Clinton to know all my secrets.
Until now, most action on the reform front has taken place abroad, especially in Europe, where concern about privacy online has led individuals as well as businesses to snub American Internet and technology companies, costing Silicon Valley billions of dollars, and accelerated construction of a European alternative to the American dominated “cloud.”
Here in the United States, the NSA continued with business as usual. As far as we know, the vast majority of the programs revealed by Snowden are still operational; there are no doubt many frightening new ones launched since 2013. Members of Congress were preparing to renew the disgusting Patriot Act this summer. One bright spot was the so-called USA Freedom Act, which purports to roll back bulk metadata collection, but privacy advocates say the legislation had been so watered down, and so tolerant of the NSA’s most excessive abuses, that it was just barely more than symbolic.
Like the Freedom Act, this ruling is largely symbolic.
The problem is, it’s not the last word. The federal government will certainly appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could take years before hearing the case. Even in the short run, the court didn’t slap the NSA with an injunction to halt its illegal collection of Americans’ metadata.
What’s particularly distressing is the fact that the court’s complaint is about the interpretation of the Patriot Act rather than its constitutionality. The Obama Administration’s interpretation of Section 215 “cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program,” said the court ruling. However: “We do so comfortably in the full understanding that if Congress chooses to authorize such a far-reaching and unprecedented program, it has every opportunity to do so, and to do so unambiguously.”
Well, ain’t that peachy.
As a rule, courts are reluctant to annul laws passed by the legislative branch of government on the grounds of unconstitutionality. In the case of NSA spying on us, however, the harm to American democracy and society is so extravagant, and the failure of the system of checks and balances to rein in the abuses so spectacular, that the patriotic and legal duty of every judge is to do whatever he can or she can to put an end to this bastard once and for all.
It’s a sad testimony to the cowardice, willful blindness and lack of urgency of the political classes that the New York court kicked the can down the road, rather than declare the NSA’s metadata collection program a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment’s right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Publication Date: August 25, 2015
Order at Amazon!
As many as 1.4 million citizens with security clearance saw some or all of the same documents revealed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Why did he, and no one else, decide to step forward and take on the risks associated with becoming a whistleblower and then a fugitive? Rall’s all-comic, full-color biography delves into Snowden’s early life and work experience, his personality, and the larger issues of privacy, surveys the new surveillance technologies being deployed against the American people, and the recent history of government intrusion. Rall describes Snowden’s political vision and hopes for the future. The book tells two stories: Snowden’s and a larger one that describes all of us on the threshold of tremendous technological upheaval and political change.
Snowden is a portrait of a brave young man standing up to the most powerful government in the world and, if not winning, at least reaching a stand-off, and in this way is an incitation to us all to measure our courage and listen to our consciences in asking ourselves what we might have done in his shoes.
Current Events/Biography, 2015
Seven Stories Press Paperback, 5″x7″, 224 pp., $16.95
To Order A Personally Signed Copy directly from Ted:
Still think the United States is governed by decent people? That the system isn’t totally corrupt and obscenely unfair?
Two stories that broke April 23rd ought to wake you up.
Story 1: President Obama admitted that one of his Predator drones killed two aid workers, an American and an Italian, who were being held hostage by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. As The Guardian reports, “The lack of specificity [about the targets] suggests that despite a much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings by, among other things, requiring ‘near certainty that the terrorist target is present,’ the U.S. continues to launch lethal operations without the necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill, a practice that has come to be known as a ‘signature strike.'”
“Lack of specificity” is putting it mildly. According to a report by the group Reprieve, the U.S. targeted 41 “terrorists” — actually, enemies of the corrupt Yemeni and Pakistani regimes — with drones during 2014. Thanks to “lack of specificity,” a total of 1,150 people were killed. Which doesn’t even include the 41 targets, many of whom got away clean.
Obama’s hammy pretend grief was Shatner-worthy. Biting his lip in that sorry/not sorry Bill Clinton way, the president summed up mock sadness for an event that happened back in January. Come on, dude. You seriously expect us to believe you’ve been all weepy for the last three months, except for all those speeches and other public appearances in which you were, you know, laughing and cracking jokes?
Including, um, the same exact day when he pretend-sadded, when he yukked it up with the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots? “That whole story got blown a little out of proportion,” he jibed. (Cuz: “deflate-gate.”) While sad. But laughing.
So. Confusing.
I swear, the right-wing racists are right to hate him. But they hate him for totally the wrong reasons.
Anyway, what took so long for the White House to admit they killed one of our best citizens? “It took weeks to correlate [the hostages’] reported deaths with the drone strikes,” The New York Times quoted White House officials. But in his prepared remarks, Obama said “capturing these terrorists was not possible” — thus the drone strike.
How stupid does the Administration think we are?
The fact that it is possible to find out who dies in a drone fact (albeit after the fact) indicates that there is reliable intelligence coming out of the targeted areas, presumably provided by local police and military sources. If there are cops and troops there who are friendly enough to give us information, then it obviously is possible to ask them to capture the targeted individuals.
Bottom line: the U.S. government is blowing up people with drones willy-nilly, without the slightest clue who they’re blowing up. Which, as political assassinations, are illegal. And which they specifically said was what they were no longer doing. Then they have the nerve to pretend to be sad about the completely avoidable consequences of their actions. They’re disgusting and gross and ought to be locked in prison forever.
Story 2: David Petraeus, former hotshot media-darling general of the Bush and early Obama years, received a slap on the wrist — probation plus a $100,000 fine — for improperly passing on classified military documents to unauthorized people and lying about it to federal agents when they questioned him about it.
Here we go again: more proof that, in the American justice system some people fly first-class while the rest of us go coach.
In this back-asswards world, people like Petraeus who ought to be held to the highest standard because they were entrusted with immense power and responsibility, walk free while low-ranking schlubs who committed the same crime get treated like Al Capone. Private Chelsea Manning, who released warlogs documenting U.S. war crimes in Iraq to Wikileaks, rots in prison for 35 years. Edward Snowden, the 31-year-old systems administrator for a private NSA outsourcing firm who revealed that the U.S. government is reading all our emails and listening to all our phone calls, faces life in prison.
Two years probation. Meanwhile, teachers who helped their students cheat on standardized tests got seven years in prison. To Petraeus, who went to work for a hedge fund, $100,000 is a nice tip for the caddy.
Adding insanity to insult is the fact that Petraeus’ motive for endangering national security was venal: he gave the documents to his girlfriend, who wrote his authorized biography. Manning and Snowden, heroes who in a sane society would receive ticker-tape parades and presidential medals of freedom, weren’t after glory. They wanted to inform the American people about atrocities committed in their name, and about wholesale violations of their basic freedoms, including the right to privacy.
Before he was caught and while he was sharing classified info with his gf, Petraeus had the gall to hypocritically pontificate about a CIA officer who disclosed sensitive information. Unlike Petraeus, the CIA guy got coach-class justice: 30 months in prison.
“Oaths do matter,” Petraeus pompously bloviated in 2012, “and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.”
If you’re a first-classer, the consequences are very small.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
aNewDomain, Moscow, 01.04.2015 — The National Security Agency is selling Americans’ personal data to private corporations in order to raise revenues for stretched federal coffers, according to a blockbuster report to be released by Second Look Media.
It turns out that Second Look, which is 50-percent owned by billionaire eBay founder Iranian-American Pierre Omidyar, is a 25-percent spinoff of First Look Media, known for transcribing NSA documents leaked by former NSA/CIA contractor Edward Snowden.
Second Look is scheduled to publish the details on April 1.
The program began during Barack Obama’s first term in office, when congressional Republicans began “cockblocking” Obama’s every move and denying even routine budget appropriations. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is reported to have suggested to the frustrated president that the government should consider “rolling big-data style, like they do in Silicon Valley” i.e., monetizing valuable personal information that is in the hands of its agencies and federal departments.
Attention naturally turned to the NSA, which methodically intercepts, stores and indexes every digital communication on earth, including those between American citizens. The communications include, but are not limited to, email, text messages, voice phone calls, cell phone metadata, faxes, bank wire transfers, and even telegraph, which is still used by remote train stations in Nevada and Utah. “If someone figures out a way to bring back the passenger pigeon, we’ll snag the sucker, Xerox its ass, and implant a chip in his brain just in case someone wants to use him to say something,” said former NSA director Michael Hayden in 2009, prior to his resignation.
According to sources, the NSA held secret online auctions on the so-called “darknet” to offer transcriptions, recordings, bank account numbers and even the sexual habits of Americans to the highest bidder, regardless of whether its country of origin has good relations with the United States.
Most of the gigantic data files ended up in relatively benign hands, such as an affiliate of the Brazilian social network Bazoo, which ran searches on Portuguese-sounding names in order to market spam email offering 35-percent discounts on Brazilian waxes.
However, the Russian energy giant Gazprom, which is closely affiliated with President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, allegedly purchased voice recordings of every phone call in the upper Midwest between February 2012 and January 2013. Although their intent can’t be known positively, analysts believe the Russians wanted to learn more about the fracking industry, both as a form of industrial espionage, and also in order to use shell companies to acquire drilling rights under the homes of registered Republicans.”
Obama administration officials speaking under condition of anonymity confirmed the basic details of this account, but deny that they did anything wrong. “First and foremost, we ran this past the lawyers. There’s a reason that they call people who live in the United States ‘Americans.’ That’s because they live in America. Anything that is in America belongs to America. In other words, people are just like dogs, cats, wild turkeys, worms, what have you – that’s the government’s property. That’s pretty much been the case ever since the Emancipation Proclamation.”
Bob Jenkins of the American Civil Liberties Union expressed concern about what he called a “novel” interpretation of constitutional law that he said “seems to contradict two centuries of legal precedent and 800 years of Anglo-American common law dating back to the Magna Carta.”
But the administration official says that the data is the president’s to sell, and he will do so as long as there is a huge federal deficit to pay off to China. Says the source, ‘Anyway, section 215(b) of the USA Patriot Act authorizes the president to do anything it takes in order to defeat Al Qaeda, and we won’t be able to take on the terrorists if we are too broke to buy any weapons.’ “
Speaking under condition of anonymity based on threats of this reporter, a representative of the NSA who may or may not work there said that the government takes care to sell American data only to private companies who “we know can pretty much be trusted.”
But that seems to be belied by a $14-million sale of DNA records belonging to Millennials and Generation Xers who make $38,000 to $54,000 a year to FarsiNet. After the sale was complete, the NSA was surprised to learn via Twitter that FarsiNet was, in fact, affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Still, the NSA has no plans to change the program as long as there is no reaction from the public. “We desperately need that extra spending money,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. “For example, you know the $14 million everyone’s making such a fuss about? We used that to add a new wing to the NSA’s new data farm in Utah. And will use the data we store there to make another $140 million, and so on and so forth, until we can finance maybe a quarter of our next war.”
For aNewDomain, I’m Red Tall.
Pundits like to say the problem with Washington is a lack of bipartisan cooperation in Congress. But we don’t need cooperation. We need representation.
Originally published by Breaking Modern:
One year ago, with Americans reeling from Edward Snowden’s revelations that the National Security Agency was systematically intercepting and storing their communications, President Obama delivered a televised speech to the nation promising reforms in order to safeguard Americans’ privacy.
“One of the biggest changes will be an overhaul of the government’s handling of bulk telephone ‘metadata,’” CNBC reported in January 2014. “In a nod to privacy advocates, Obama decided that the government should not hold the bulk telephone metadata, a decision that could frustrate some intelligence officials.”
Telephony metadata is industry jargon for basic information about a phone call: the number from which it originates, the number called, the duration of the call, and the geographical locations of both ends of the call. NSA defenders, including the president, argued that Americans shouldn’t be concerned about the bulk collection of these records because they didn’t include the content of the call, or the names of the phone customers involved.
In fact, as reported two months later in March 2014, the NSA does record and store recordings of American’s phone calls. Also, as a pair of Stanford University researchers proved, it is ridiculously easy to match phone numbers to names.
So Obama’s 2014 promise to place metadata under the control of a third party was never going to be much of a big deal from a privacy standpoint.
Lame as it was, even that pledge is dead.
“President Barack Obama’s administration has quietly abandoned a proposal it had been considering to put raw U.S. telephone call data collected by the National Security Agency under non-governmental control, several U.S. security officials said,” according to Reuters.
The Administration cited “concerns about the extra costs of moving data from telecom companies to a third party, and in a format which the government agencies found easy to use.”
Ah, the problems of those who spy on us so much that they don’t know what to do with all the data that they end up with. How to format it? Excel spreadsheet? Comma-delineated? Lotus 1-2-3? This is the government were talking about.
Reuters again: “The official said that no final decision had been made on the issue, but said the President’s goal remained that the government would no longer hold the data.” Given the fact that it is also the president’s goal to close Guantánamo, in almost no progress has been made toward that end in six years, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Next month the Director of National Intelligence, who oversees the NSA and CIA, is scheduled to release a report detailing what progress, if any, the Obama administration has made to safeguard our privacy in the year since the president’s January 2014 speech.
I’m expecting that will be a short report.
